The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (38 page)

Because I was learning to be insolent, I wore the outfit anyway. I
don’t remember anyone else commenting on my clothes that day, but I do remember this: the feelings I had that morning getting dressed—of confidence, strength of identity, and pride in my own self-expression—were subsumed for the rest of the day by the impulse to hide and hunch my shoulders, my mother’s voice echoing in my ear.

This, I later realized, was the problem with my mother’s brand of feminism. She had taught me that without exception, my body was my own, that I was the only one who could decide what to do with it. But as I grew into an age when that decision-making process had actual implications, I learned that there were rigid limits to what I should choose.

I can hear my mother now, saying that there is a tremendous gap in both significance and relevance between the right to wear high-heeled boots and the right to safe and affordable contraception and prenatal care. But of course, even she would recognize that a world in which women are taught that their appearance—and not their words and actions—is what signals their sexual availability, is a world in which women can never be free or equal. And yet that is, for now, the world we live in.

I began working in pornography not because I wanted to have another argument with my mother, and (mostly) not because I wanted to wear high-heeled boots. I needed the money.

I want to be clear about the level of need I’m describing here. Only very rarely have I felt compelled to take a sex-work job because I believed I was truly in danger of losing my home or my ability to feed myself. I’ve never done what’s often called “survival” sex work. What this work has mainly provided for me is something on the second level of Maslow’s pyramid—safety and financial security, and the opportunity to reach for that little self-actualization triangle at the top of the pyramid through access to higher education. While I don’t want to underestimate the shift in the quality of my life made possible by having those second-level needs fulfilled, I also want to emphasize that my ability to choose adult-industry jobs in which I felt safe and respected (at least as respected as I ever felt in service-industry work), was undoubtedly affected by the kind of needs I was aiming for.

I did my first nude photo shoot when I was nineteen. The photos and short video clips the producer shot that day were for a “college co-eds” themed website. I was not in college at that point, but I hoped to be. I used the money from that first shoot to move to San Francisco, where I began classes at San Francisco State University (SFSU). I believed the photo shoot was a one-time deal, something that provided a necessary paycheck, but not something that I would do again.

During my first two semesters at SFSU, I worked seven to noon at a
daycare center, took classes from noon to four, worked at a coffee shop from 4:30 until 8:30, and then did my homework at night while eating bowls of canned soup, my clothes invariably covered in spoiled milk and baby vomit. During my third semester of college, in an effort to streamline my schedule, I gave up the job at the daycare and added more hours at the coffee shop. I worked opening shifts, freezing in the dark while waiting for the train at four thirty in the morning to get to work by five. I worked five days a week and went to school on my two days off.

I wanted to finish school and become a writer. I didn’t know how one became a writer, but I knew that I couldn’t string the words together into clear sentences when I was exhausted all the time. Because I had already done one photo shoot—had already ruined my political career—it was easier for me, sometime toward the end of my third semester, to consider nude modeling. I picked up copies of the
San Francisco Bay Guardian
and
San Francisco Weekly
and began circling back-page ads. I quit my job at the coffee shop and relied on photo shoots, and eventually film shoots, for my income.

At first, my experiences posing nude for money were not exceptionally different from my experiences with other kinds of work. That is to say, I showed up, put on a uniform, and followed directions. The men I worked for were mostly professionals in software engineering or other tech fields who had purchased expensive cameras and draped their living rooms with sheets of fabric in their own approximations of an “erotic” photography studio. Occasionally, I worked for an amateur pornographer or a foot fetishist or a bondage aficionado. Sometimes they asked me to smoke cigarettes or masturbate or hold my toes in a very particular way. Though I was getting paid to be naked in the homes of strangers, this kind of work felt neither bad nor exciting. I thought maybe I would write about the experience, but I found it to be so repetitive that when I sat down with my pen and notepad, I didn’t have a whole lot to say about it.

Sometime during that first year, I had discovered Natacha Merritt’s book of photography
Digital Diaries.
I’d grown up with Georgia O’Keefe prints, and Merritt’s work struck me as a fresh presentation of the concept—the female body self-presented, with an allowance for decoration, vividity, glitter, and—most importantly
—desire.
As I posed for dozens of amateur photographers, I entertained the hope that I might once have an opportunity to be part of making something that beautiful. But making something beautiful was not my priority—making rent was—and so I didn’t seek out the photographers who were artists; I looked for the ones who paid well. I found that there was an inversely proportional relationship
between the number of times a photographer called his own work “art” and the amount he paid per hour.

This is how I went from nude model to porn performer. Since I wasn’t the one behind the camera choosing the composition, I found that the difference in my own experience of the work—between a masturbation shoot during which the camera was framed on my face (“art”) and a masturbation shoot during which the camera was framed on my crotch (“porn”)—showed up only in my paycheck. The more I got paid, the better I felt about the work. After the first year, I stopped working for still photographers entirely, and moved on to the much better paying solo video shoots. Not long after that, I moved on to performing in girl/girl shoots, and later to boy-girl, and eventually to shoots with everyone on the gender spectrum. For the first three years, I didn’t even look at the images that came out of these shoots. The extent of my experience happened in that room—there was the job and then there was the paycheck. But eventually, of course, I had to look.

When I told my mother I was working in pornography, she cried. I didn’t expect her to be happy for me, but her tears actually shocked me. She said she worried I was being “exploited.” This was the first real blow to my confidence in my decision making.

I was lucky that my closest friends worried only about my safety. If they had any moral qualms or emotional concerns about my job, they kept them to themselves. The people I dated, however, were another story. One lover asked me what had happened to me that “made” me “this way.” Another shouted to the bartender one night, “my girlfriend’s a porn star,” in an attempt to get free drinks; in bed one night after we’d had sex, she asked me how much that would have cost her. More than one of my lovers called me a whore—sometimes this was meant as a term of endearment, other times it was to be cruel. It wasn’t that I hadn’t been aware of the possibility of these reactions; it was that I truly didn’t expect them from people who
knew
me. And I couldn’t have anticipated how being called a whore would make me feel. Mostly it made me feel a strange kind of dissonance—mostly it struck me as a gap in definitions.
If I am a whore,
I thought,
that word doesn’t really mean what you think it means.

In addition to the reactions of people I knew, there were the reactions of people I didn’t know. In 2003, I worked my first adult-industry convention. In Las Vegas, for the first time, I met fans. I shook their hands in the lobby of the Stardust and posed for pictures in a corset and miniskirt. I was twenty-two, and I was startled to confront the reality of my audience. Back at home, I logged onto the Internet and began to read the
reactions people wrote to my video images. I was startled to discover the power of the persona that I had—almost inadvertently—created.

It wasn’t until after this discovery that I began to willfully shape that persona. This was a revelation. It was a discovery that came down to costuming. At the same time that I was coming out as a sex worker and a whore—unpacking those terms and coming to realize how their connotations did and didn’t apply to me—I was discovering my identity as a queer femme. This was a moment when so many of my influences converged. There was my mother who had dressed me always in denim and boots, who believed that lipstick and Lady Bic were tools of the patriarchy. There was the related kind of second-wave feminist lesbian aesthetic I’d grown up around—an image of “androgyny” that I never felt an affinity for, and a stereotype of lesbianism that made me think I couldn’t possibly be queer because I didn’t want to wear the outfit. And then there was my work in porn—work in which the aesthetic is fetishized, in which I learned the transformations made possible by costuming, and the ways that I could make a play out of my gender presentation, and my presentation of sexual cues, without it having anything necessarily to do with my internal sense of self. In other words, I learned who I was—in terms of my sexual and gender identity—by pretending, in a very exaggerated way, to be who I wasn’t. This is how being a sex worker intertwines for me with being a feminist and being queer.

While performing naked never felt bad or wrong to me, being called a whore at cocktail parties and in my lovers’ bedrooms had an impact. Pretty quickly, I had to ask myself whether I believed that what I was doing was worth the social consequences. Reflexively, it was easy for me to say yes. Because I’d been raised with a belief in my own sexual and bodily autonomy, and because I’d never felt coerced into performing, my first reaction to criticism was anger. I knew that I’d chosen to continue to do this job because it was the best financial choice for me—because the benefits outweighed the costs. When my lovers questioned that choice, I felt they were dismissing my rational capability. Though I knew my mother’s concern came out of love, I thought her assertion that I’d been exploited was the same as her saying I didn’t know any better, that I wasn’t adult enough to make my own decisions—and maybe that is exactly what she meant. But my mother is also the woman who always taught me that I was the only one who could determine right and wrong. My mother is the woman who taught me how history has proven that the beliefs and values of the majority can be monstrously in opposition to real ethics and justice, that mores are not morals, and that if I ever want to be able to make choices, I better work to develop my own careful
moral compass. My mother is the one who told me that I have to make the most difficult decisions on my own.

Taking a step back from my personal relationships, the societal idea of women’s exploitation deserves another look. The idea that jobs in the sex industry are resorted to out of economic need—or lack of better economic choices—is often cited as evidence that the adult industries are exploitative. The relationship between porn producers and performers is then seen as a kind of economic coercion. This idea assumes that performers are somehow lessened or devalued by their performances in a way that is not compensable by their earnings. An extension of this kind of thinking is the oft-repeated false axiom that women in porn are “forced” to do more “extreme” performances as their careers continue and they need to earn more money.

These ideas come out of a combination of two worn-out and insulting gendered sexual myths. First, that a woman’s sexuality has a finite value—that she somehow loses sexual desirability as her number of partners or experiences increases. And second, that female sexuality is categorically different from male sexuality—that no woman wants to have “that kind” of sex (or perhaps any kind of sex at all). While there may be examples of performers who have felt some kind of pressure from a particular agent or director (the industry, like all industries, is comprised of both scrupulous and unscrupulous people), it is just as easy to count women with long porn careers who will tell you they chose to do each of their at-work performances as freely as many people choose to work in office buildings—and many of these women never perform in the more “extreme” or “hardcore” genres.

Also disregarded by this line of thinking are those of us who graduate to what are considered more “extreme” on-camera acts (including anal sex, double-penetrations, fisting, and any number of “fetish” activities) because we’re interested in pushing our bodies in an athletic sense, or because we want to create a certain kind of performance, or because we believe this kind of imagery is necessary because it more closely approximates our own desires. I know that my own on-camera performances didn’t actually become interesting to me, didn’t feel much different from punching a clock, until I began to create performances that felt physically challenging—and were thus dubbed “extreme” or “hardcore.” Participating in these hardcore performances, and watching other women joyfully, breathlessly explore the limits of their own bodies was where I first began to find that elusive thing I’d indirectly sought since first stepping in front of a camera—physical beauty.

This is when working in pornography truly became exciting to me.
I realized that for years I had looked at images of women in fashion magazines and mainstream narrative films and television shows who had presented an idea of “sexy” that seemed synonymous with “pretty.” Countless times I’d looked at women on billboards with perfectly curled hair and immaculately made-up faces, women in movies whose role had been to stand coyly bathed in a certain kind of light and wait to be kissed, wait to say yes or no. Women who flirted but never asked for what they wanted. Women who knew that sex was inextricable from love and that love was usually the precursor to marriage. Even now, female characters who stray from this stereotype in movies or TV shows usually end up dead at the end of the film—or are punished with disease, abandonment, or social isolation.