The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (34 page)

Even though antiporn activists of both the religious and scholarly types would reject out of hand anything produced by secular humanist scientists, it is still useful to present the fossil record of porn that can be discovered by teaching porn historically as a genre and an industry, as film and popular culture, with all the methods and tools we take to studying other media and cultural forms. What happens when a class of student researchers asks the same kinds of questions about porn that they have already addressed in their other classes on film and media history and theory; close analysis; genres; digital and new media; independent, experimental, and Hollywood film production, distribution, and reception? How have the styles, strategies, and contents of the genre changed over time? What have been porn’s modes of production and distribution? What have been the venues and audiences for porn’s reception? What is porn’s relation to developing and changing technologies? How has the legal climate in any given era shaped all of the above? Only after getting a grasp of this history can one begin to speak about the multitude of pornographies, rather than a monolithic capital “P” Pornography. Only then can one begin to ask what and whom porn is for. Only then can one begin to make claims about what porn actually is and how its production and consumption interact with all other forms of
production and consumption; and how it has served as a nexus through which almost every moral, aesthetic, political, and philosophical issue can be argued. I offer here some key discoveries of what should be porn’s irrefutable fossil record that my students and I make while engaging with the films, readings, and numerous guest lecturers from the mainstream adult industry and its indie edges.

But as a preface, let me say how teaching porn offers the best possible lesson on the nature of academic freedom, an often-misunderstood idea that is so crucial to the free pursuit of knowledge in a university setting. When I first started teaching the course, students would sidle up to me and almost whisper, “How did they let you do it?” I would reply, “Who’s the
they
?” I explain to them that no one can object to my teaching and research on moral or religious grounds, not another professor, the university administration, or anyone in government, the churches, or the community. Academic freedom protects the right of free inquiry for teachers and researchers. If I say that I feel the need to teach a class on pornography in a media studies curriculum because it is the most enduring and prolific of all film genres, that there’s hundreds of thousands of titles out there, and that it’s a multibillion dollar business centered in the San Fernando Valley just eighty miles to the south, then one can only object—again not on moral or religious grounds—by refuting my facts. No, it’s not the most enduring and prolific of all film genres . . . Or, they could try questioning my scholarly credentials to carry out such teaching and research—that would be hard. Or, they could try questioning whether my students are capable of dealing with the materials—you’ve already seen where that got them (as my students insisted, academic freedom should work for them, too). So here are some highlights of what we discovered in that free search for truth that the common good depends on:

Porn isn’t what you think it is, whatever you think it is.
I always begin my class with the money shot of porn history:
Deep Throat
(1972). Most students have never seen it. They may have heard enough about it that they think they know it, but they don’t. They are astonished that it’s a real film with a plot, dialogue, character arcs, mise-en-scene, and special effects. It’s much more experimental, funny, and over-the-top than they expected, especially in its satire on advertising and mass culture consumption, such as the borrowed advertising jingles and wildly inappropriate product placements for Coke and Old Spice. If the students are really paying attention, they can even see its surprising
Jane Eyre
ending, where the hero is only acceptable to the heroine when he accepts his castration. I also spend a lot of time in the first few weeks of the class on
the stag film, the anonymously produced black-and-white one-reelers shown by peripatetic projectionists in traditional men’s spaces such as the fraternal lodge, fraternity house, bachelor party, or back of the barber shop. The students experience quite a surprise, if not an epistemological shock, at seeing people who look like photos of their great-grandparents engaging in oral sex, anal sex, interracial sex, BDSM, girl/girl, bestiality; strapping on dildos, playing with vibrators, pulling on rubbers, and even occasionally slipping a little male homosexuality into the heterosexual mix, something almost never found today.

There’s more to learn about porn than you’d ever expect.
On the second day of class, I show
Inside Deep Throat
(2005), the documentary by Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato, produced by Brian Glazer. It features scenes from the movie, news of the time, and interviews, both from the archive and made for the film, with director Gerard Damiano, actor Harry Reems, actress Linda Lovelace, Gore Vidal, Larry Flynt, Hugh Hefner, John Waters, Erica Jong, a prosecutor, Reems’ defense, Mafia money collectors, and other people involved in or just commenting on the film. Much of the material was compiled from approximately eight hundred hours of interview and archive footage collected by the filmmakers. The documentary takes on the controversy around the film as a cultural phenomenom and exposes not only the vital and underreported history of obscenity prosecution but the surprising cluelessness of the court about female sexual anatomy. I hold that film up to my students as a high bar of imaginative, in-depth porn scholarship to which they should aspire.
Inside Deep Throat
is the perfect counter to the claim that “There’s no there there” when it comes to porn—that is, there’s nothing there worth researching.

One’s critical stance toward porn is all about taste, especially when it is unconscious or unacknowledged.
The class’s first reading assignment is to look closely at magazine and news articles written about the class and about the adult industry. In articles in the
New Yorker, Hustler, Lingua Franca, Time
, the
New York Times Magazine,
and others, I ask my students to be on the lookout for the elitist “maneuver” or “turn” that inevitably occurs near the end of the reportage, even when that reportage has been surprisingly accurate and useful. Either the editor or the author feels obliged to offer a conclusion like “But do we really need an entire curriculum devoted to porn—after all it’s just dirty movies?” Or the journalists conclude their overviews of the industry with comments on the surprising banality of the people and lives in the adult industry or gratuitous remarks about their bad taste in home furnishings. We learn to detect critics’ knee-jerk habit of putting porn in a quarantine zone to
protect their own sensibilities from any porno contagion.
²
Ideally, we learn not to take this unthinking stance ourselves.

Porn is a Victorian invention.
Students learn that explicit erotic imagery has a long history but only became “pornography” when gentlemen scholars decided to lock away in a secret museum the wildly erotic artifacts discovered in the ruins of Pompeii, believing they were the only ones with the education and sensibility not to be affected by them. Again, it is an epistemological shock for my students to realize that porn is not a singular ahistorical thing but largely a social construction prompted, at the very least, by class, taste, and fear. Fenton Bailey, who also co-produced the most informative documentary on porn and the moral panics about its increasing democratization through technological evolution, the six-part
Pornography: A Secret History of Civilization
(1999) for the UK’s Channel Four, is a frequent visitor to our class. His company, World of Wonder, which he runs with Barbato, is the best producer of feature films, documentaries, and television shows about sex, popular culture, and all things queer. We start a conversation with Bailey that carries on throughout the class about the enormous challenges of making serious yet engaging documentaries about porn, including several failed attempts by me and Linda Williams to turn into a film our hugely successful two-hour “History of Hardcore” presentation at the 1994 Telluride Film Festival, and my own thwarted attempt to make HBO’s
Porn 101 with Professor Penley,
which became
Katie Morgan’s Porn 101.

Porn isn’t lewd for nothing.
We read this claim about porn’s social and political function in Lynn Hunt’s
The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800
.
³
The contributors to that volume give a wealth of examples of the way pornography was used during that period to challenge absolutist political authority and church doctrine, variously linked as it was to free thinking, heresy, science, and natural philosophy. But as the genre becomes more mass cultural and increasingly “tasteless,” can we still recognize porn’s historical continuity with avant-garde revolutionary art, populist struggles, or any kind of countercultural impulses? My answer would be “Yes,” taking as the most obvious example the porn parodies of Hollywood that have been with us from 1923’s
The Casting Couch,
with its Mack Sennett-like character abusing his power to get girls on the Keystone casting couch, to 1993’s
The Sperminator,
a gay male film with an Arnold Schwarzenegger look-alike, in which John Conner and Kyle Reese get together to sperminate the Sperminator, thus twitting the closeted homosexuality of the bodybuilding world and Hollywood.

Porn is film.
In her groundbreaking
Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible
” (1989), Linda Williams was the first feminist media scholar, in fact the first media scholar, to produce a historical and theoretical account of a film genre and industry whose low social and cultural status had hitherto made it off bounds to serious scholars.
⁴
Drawing on feminist, Marxist, cultural, and psychoanalytic theory; textual and narrative analysis; and archival research, she made the case not only that porn could be studied but that it must be studied to advance both film history and theory, and feminist discourse on sexuality and representation. Her original discovery is that the earliest porn films, the “stags,” “blue movies,” or “smokers” shared with early silent film the exhilarating promise of showing us things that our unaided eye could not see, either close-up or exotically far away. Porn’s cinematic promise was that it could show us the most invisible and unknown of all: the female orgasm, which occurs internally and can even be faked. This discovery leads Williams to the counterintuitive conclusion that porn may indeed speak primarily to male desire, but, at the very least, has to take a long detour through the question of female desire.

Two other related studies that prove exceptionally useful to our comparative understanding of porn as film, as a genre, and an industry, are Eric Schaeffer’s brilliant history of porn’s kissing cousin, the exploitation film
Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!: A History of Exploitation Films, 1960–1979,
where he illuminates the contours of porn by comparing it to a genre that negotiated in very different ways the demands of representing and distributing films about sex and other taboo subjects.
⁵
Jon Lewis’s book,
Hollywood v. Hardcore: How the Struggle Over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry
(2000) shows how Hollywood fundamentally shaped the future of hard core pornographic film by exiling it from the industrywide Motion Picture Association of America film rating system, pushing sexually explicit films outside the mainstream and, with a series of Supreme Court decisions, outside of theatrical distribution.
⁶
These theoretical and historical studies of what pornographic film is and how it came to be counter monolithic claims about everything from the genre’s contents to its modes of production, distribution, and consumption. The powerful analyses of these film scholars allow us to understand pornographic film not as some footnote to film history or a minor sideline but a key component of that history.

Porn is popular culture.
If Linda Williams’s bold move was to drag pornographic film onto the spectrum of all other genres and modes of film production for serious study, other researchers including myself have productively folded porn into the realm of popular culture. A more cultural studies approach focuses on issues of reception/consumption as
well as aesthetics/production, issues that are necessarily going to involve considerations of class, taste, and everyday life. But here, too, close reading is important as a start. In her influential essay “(Male) Desire, (Female) Disgust: Reading
Hustler
,” Laura Kipnis tells us how she made herself overcome what was supposed to be her natural feminine revulsion for the magazine to sit down one day and actually look at it. She discovered that this most reviled instance of mass circulation porn is also one of the most explicitly class antagonistic periodicals of any genre, devoted to skewering every social, political, or intellectual hypocrisy and pretension. Her close reading of
Hustler
’s photos, cartoons, features, ads, and essays also reveals a world where sex is an arena of humiliation for men, not domination of women: “The fantasy life here is animated by cultural disempowerment in relation to a sexual caste system and a social class system.”
⁷
Hustler,
she says, puts into question a male fantasy that represents power, money, and prestige as essential to sexual success and mocks those who believe the upscale promises of
Playboy
and
Penthouse.
Kipnis was thus one of the first scholars to debunk antiporn activists’ claims about men’s monolithic consumption of porn, as one that revels in dominating and degrading women.