The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (35 page)

Like Kipnis, Eithne Johnson and Eric Schaefer also convincingly demonstrate the value of analyzing films and cultural materials that are seen as so low as to be unworthy of serious scholarship, from the exploitation film and the beaver film to the urban legend that is the snuff film. I hold up to my students their essay, “Soft Core/Hard Gore:
Snuff
as a Crisis in Meaning,” as a model of research that is interdisciplinary and informed by a wide range of sources including both mainstream and industry newspapers and periodicals, archival accounts, interviews, and meticulous attention to the structure of the film.
⁸
In analyzing the controversy around a 1976 exploitation film (originally titled
The Slaughter
) that was given a tacked-on, patently fake (but taken as real) ending where the director comes from behind the camera and tortures and disembowels the female star, they show how the film was deployed to “shift the definition of pornography—from sexual representation to a literal inscription of male dominance over women.”
⁹
Once antiporn feminists had an image that could kill, they could easily join “a larger discursive formation regulating low culture by indicting audiences for ‘unhealthy’ appetites, lobbying for social protectionism, policing morally suspect material, and segregating it through combat zone rhetoric.”
¹⁰
In other words, if
Snuff
didn’t exist or couldn’t stand in for all the mythical snuff films, antiporn feminists would have had to create it. The undertitle of Kipnis’s book
Bound and Gagged,
in which the
Hustler
study appears
as a chapter, is
Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America
.
¹¹
Johnson and Schaeffer, too, attend to the politics of that work of fantasy in a cultural phenomenon, “the snuff film,” that is right down there with
Hustler.

In
At Home with Pornography: Women, Sex, and Everyday Life
(1998), Jane Juffer adopts a cultural studies approach to make a crucial intervention in what she calls the fruitless debate about whether women in relation to porn are hapless victims or transgressive agents. When some porn scholars give individual films or magazines such as
Snuff
and
Hustler
an overdetermining power to influence the lives of men, women, and children, we can’t even ask, she says, more important if less spectacular questions about how women consume porn in their everyday lives. “What are the material and discursive conditions in which
different kinds
of pornography are produced, distributed, obtained, and consumed?”
¹²
By studying a range of artifacts including women’s literary erotica, masturbation discourse, adult cable programming, couples’ video porn, cybersex, sex toys for women, lingerie catalogs, and sexual self-help books, Juffer shows how porn is domesticated for women in ways that both challenge and reinforce traditional notions of home and domesticity. Women are active consumers of porn when we expand the genre to a range of products, styles, and representations that address female pleasure.

David Andrews, too, makes an original contribution to understanding pornography in the everyday lives of women by being the first to survey the contemporary softcore feature as a middlebrow form of pornography situated ambiguously between hardcore and Hollywood. Like Juffer, Andrews is critical of feminist porn scholars who have given so much attention to hardcore—especially since one of softcore’s most distinguishing characteristics is having a female protagonist—seen as more transgressive, avant-garde, and “masculine,” while ignoring the “feminine” softness of the softcore genre. Drawing on original industrial research, extensive sampling, and wide-ranging scholarship,
Soft in the Middle: The Contemporary Softcore Feature in Its Contexts
(2006) examines the genre’s history, formal and ideological conventions, sub-genres, styles, and motifs, as well as its most influential studios, directors, and texts.
¹³
Andrews meticulously traces the prehistory of the softcore feature from the nudie cuties and burlesque films of the 1930s and 1940s to the sexploitation films of the 1960s and on to today’s softcore features, discreetly ensconced on late-night cable television. We learn a great deal from scholars like Juffer and Andrews who focus on individual texts
and genres, but only to show their meanings in the everyday life uses of women consumers.

A big strength of the cultural studies approach to pornography and issues of taste, class, and everyday life is the inevitable understanding that once you are in the realm of popular culture, everything is impure. Any cultural instance is both ideological and utopian, both containment and resistance, both desirous and anxious. This lesson from Gayatri Spivak, Stuart Hall, and Frederic Jameson, among others, can help feminist porn scholarship avoid pitting my taste against your taste in order to study the work of taste itself.

Porn is racist but there’s a lot more to it than that, a lot more.
I am not the only porn professor who laments the paucity of work on race in porn. If it weren’t for Susie Bright’s infamously killed 1986 piece for
AVN,
“The History of Inter-racial and Black Adult Video” (later published in
Susie Bright’s Journal
and now online in
The Erotic Screen,
vol. 1), we would have had nothing on Jim Crow and the adult video, nothing of the voices of the directors and performers who tried to work within and against the worst stereotypes and most terrible prejudices, including Sahara, Jeannie Pepper, Angel Kelly, and, in his own admittedly perverse way, Greg Dark. Bright shows that the adult industry in the 1970s and 1980s was so racist that it didn’t even know how to take advantage of an unplundered area of creativity: “For interracial and black videos, there is a vast never-tried zone of creativity and self-expression for interracial and black videos, which could bring riches, as well as honor, to those bold enough to explore it.”
¹⁴
But she does give one thing to the adult video world, “the trash-talking cousin to Hollywood”: “[It] is more honest about their prejudices than their straight industry counterparts. We won’t ever hear a Hollywood actress say
in print
that she refuses romantic scenes with a black man.”
¹⁵

I am extraordinarily fortunate to have as my colleagues Celine Parreñas Shimizu and Mireille Miller-Young (what’s the luck of having three porn professors at one university?) who have pioneered the study of that “unplundered area of creativity” and who generously share their research with my students. In
The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene
,
¹⁶
Shimizu moves beyond denunciations of negative sexualized representations of Asian American women to argue for a more nuanced approach, “productive perversity,” that allows those women and other women of color to lay claim to their own sexuality and desires as actors, producers, critics, and spectators. She combines theoretical and textual analysis with interviews and ethnographic
study to consider Asian American women’s performances in films ranging from the stag films of the 1940s to the Internet and video porn of the 1990s. Shimizu’s most recent book,
Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies,
is almost a sequel, extending to Asian masculinity the same consideration of resistance and agency she gave to Asian female performance.
¹⁷
In her forthcoming book,
A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women, Sex Work, and Pornography,
Miller-Young introduces the idea of “illicit erotic labor” to capture the efforts of black performers to carve out a successful space for creative expression through self-fashioned performances that attempt to work within and against stereotypes.
¹⁸
Her work, too, shows the strength of combining textual, narrative, and performance analyses with in-the-field interviews with black performers from the “golden age,” including Angel Kelly and Jeannie Pepper (dubbed by
Hustler,
“the Rosa Parks of Porn,” for being the first African American woman inducted into the AVN Hall of Fame) to Afro-geek webmistress Sinnamon Love. The work of Shimizu and Miller-Young on race in pornography—shown in all of its contradiction and complexity—challenges the essentializing antiporn feminist claim that porn is purely and simply racist with no possibility for any kind of agency or critique from within or without.

Porn is gay or “Why does the gay stuff have to be so good?”
In the first years of my class, male students would leave in droves when I got to gay male porn, starting with 1940s and 1950s films from Bob Mizer’s
Athletic Model Guild
and continuing through Wakefield Poole’s
Boys in the Sand
(1970), Christopher Rage’s 1970s and 1980s New York City rough trade films, Joe Gage’s “Working Man’s Trilogy (1976–1979),” William Higgins’s Catalina films, such as
Pizza Boy: He Delivers
(1985), Jerry Douglas’s
More of a Man
(1990), and of course all of the great gay male porn/avant-garde crossovers, including Kenneth Anger’s
Scorpio Rising
(1963) and Andy Warhol’s
Blow Job
(1964). The walkouts would always be a flashpoint in the class, especially when the women, who had staunchly sat through everything, would taunt the men, saying things like, “Afraid you’re going to get turned on?!” Now, very gradually, it has almost become uncool to leave, to reveal yourself in that way. I also no longer get the complaint from the anxious male students, “Why does the gay stuff have to be so good?” As film students, they begrudgingly appreciate the relatively greater art and craft of the gay male films in relation to much of the heterosexual product but are still a bit taken aback by how attracted they are to the films as film.

So, too, they can’t help but be interested in the very good documentaries on the making of gay male porn films such as Ronnie Larsen’s
Shooting Porn
(1997), which depicts the distinctive directing styles of Chi Chi LaRue and frequent guest lecturer Gino Colbert. My students also know enough about film to be able to assess the claims about gay male porn and its difference from straight porn by noted gay historians and critics such as Thomas Waugh. His
Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall
(1996) not only unearths the history of moving image gay male film but also serves to rebuke the monolithic antiporn characterization of porn as representations of men degrading and brutalizing women.
¹⁹
Other early and key studies that we find useful include Waugh’s “Men’s Pornography: Gay vs. Straight”
²⁰
; Richard Dyer’s “Coming to Terms: Gay Pornography”;
²¹
Kobena Mercer’s “Skin Head Sex Thing: Racial Difference and the Homoerotic Imaginary”;
²²
Richard Fung’s “Looking for My Penis: The Eroticized Asian in Gay Video Porn”;
²³
and Earl Jackson Jr.’s “A Graphic Specularity.”
²⁴
Students are able to get a strong sense from these essays of the greater level of affective investment in porn when the community that is producing and consuming it is an outlawed sexual or racial minority. This is yet another insight that de-essentializes porn as just one thing.

Porn is a business.
One of the first assignments in my class is to go to the library and online to compare and contrast the two leading adult industry trade journals,
AVN
and
XBIZ World,
kind of the
Variety
and
Broadcasting and Cable
of porn. Students vaguely know porn is a business, even a big business, but they didn’t know it was a
business,
from studios and corporations to mom-and-pop retail stores, with its own news outlets, convention circuits, and trade associations such as the Free Speech Coalition, which manages legal, ethical, legislative, financial, and health issues for its members. In closely examining these journals the students come to appreciate both the scope of the adult industry and also the extraordinary difficulties of making claims about its economics, as Joseph Slade outlines in his chapter on that topic in his invaluable reference guide,
Pornography and Sexual Representation
.
²⁵
How can one authoritatively claim that porn is a 10–12 billion dollar industry (a figure that appears to have been pulled out of someone’s booty in the 1990s and endlessly repeated by critics, journalists, and mainstream business analysts) when it is difficult to establish what the industry even consists of? We can’t know corporate figures because few publically traded companies have ties to the industry and, if they do, they are often buried in much larger revenue reports from other company businesses; we can’t account for amateur or indy porn revenues because they are so underground and decentralized; we can’t isolate film or video production from
related industries ranging from “novelty” retail (sex toys), dancing, or escorting. And of course Internet business is notoriously hard to quantify, no matter what the industry. To understand how porn is a business in our community, we take a field trip to the local video store. Some of the students compare the more upscale adult store in town, a clean, well-lit place with ten thousand titles from couples’ erotica to backdoor DVDs, to a much more dimly lit, older adult store downtown with “preview booths.” We learn a great deal about the changing business models in the adult industry (gay and straight) from guest lecturers who are trade journalists and critics, studio heads, directors, performers, web mistresses, attorneys, trade association heads, and independent producers of queer, feminist, kink, and alternative varieties