The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (39 page)

Pornography, for me, was the antidote. It was on set that I first saw women taking full control of a sexual encounter. Women acting as the sexual aggressors. Women whose makeup became smeared, whose hair was sweat-gnarled, who were contorted and bent in decidedly un-pretty shapes, covered in spit and sweat and lube, laughing or shouting in a full-throated testament to the human capability for joy.

And it was on set that I was first asked this powerful question: What do you want to do? There is a kind of irony in the fact that people so often link pornography with coercion, when it is on porn sets that I really learned what it is to give consent. Never in a civilian sexual encounter had I been explicitly asked what I was and wasn’t willing to do with my body. Never before had someone presented me with a list of options or said, “I want to do these three things today, how does that sound?”

The first time I was asked the questions “What do you like?” and “What do you want to do?” I couldn’t answer them. I didn’t know what I liked, because no one had ever asked me before. It wasn’t until I’d tried some things, talked about others, and watched other women perform, that I began to know what kind of performances I wanted to create and how those overlapped and didn’t overlap with the things I wanted to do off camera.

When I say that pornography is good for women, I mean that sexually explicit imagery in which women are shown giving performative demonstrations of their own sexual power is imagery that can transform the cultural paradigm and ultimately change the world. While there are certainly pornographic productions that don’t show women in roles that are any different from those of women in the mainstream media—productions in which women aren’t shown as having agency or internally fueled desire—there are also plenty of adult films being made in which aspects of women’s sexuality are being performed in ways you’ll
never see in the mainstream media. These are films that seldom receive cultural analysis on the newsstand. These are films that show the full ugly-sexy beauty of women’s bodies. Some of these films are directed by women—like Kylie Ireland, Tristan Taormino, Nina Hartley, Belladonna, Courtney Trouble, Princess Donna, or Madison Young (just to name a small sample). Some of these films are powerful simply because the female performers in them—women like Annette Schwarz, Claire Adams, Sasha Grey, or Adrianna Nicole—bring their own raw power to every performance they give.

Part of the problem in national discourse is that distinctions between different kinds of pornographic images are so infrequently made. We can’t even get to that discussion, of course, because we don’t know what we mean when we say “pornography.” The word has been used to describe everything along a spectrum that reaches from
The Color Purple
and
Lady Chatterley’s Lover
to the work of art photographers Larry Clark and Robert Mapplethorpe (whose primary intention is not necessarily to titillate or arouse), to the work of Anaïs Nin, Anne Rice, and even Madonna (whose primary intention might be to arouse), to the heavily airbrushed pages of
Playboy
and the softcore of late-night HBO, to the mainstream hardcore productions of companies like Digital Playground, Vivid, and Wicked Productions, to the artful fetish productions of Evil Angel and the conscientious BDSM of
Kink.com
, to the scatological films of Ira Isaacs and Marco Fiorito. If you ask someone whether they believe that pornography is a societal problem, you have no way of knowing where along that spectrum lie the images that are evoked in their mind by the word.

And of course determining the intention and level of explicitness of a production (two elements of concern in the legal classification of obscenity) doesn’t even begin to take into account the working conditions under which an image was made or the sociopolitical impact of the finished piece. In my mind, it is these last two categories that must be examined in order to determine the moral and ethical justness of that image (two elements that are ostensibly of concern to groups as disparate as feminists, “compassionate conservatives,” and cultural pundits).

Similarly, if I tell someone that I perform in pornography, I have no idea what they imagine: posing for stills in white lace lingerie on a canopied bed; posing in fishnets and eyeliner for a punk, tattooed “alternative” Suicide-Girls-style photo shoot; flogging a bound man while fully dressed in latex; playing the wife, schoolgirl, or secretary in a fully-plotted, high-production-value, mainstream, heterosexual adult feature; or getting fisted by a transgender man in an independent queer film. Each
of those scenarios is bound to evoke a different reaction in the mind of the person who imagines it, and each scenario might have a very different sociopolitical impact and context—an impact and context that are not necessarily at all related to the working conditions under which the images were made. Whether you think I am a feminist, or even a moral person, has everything to do with your own definition of what pornography is, and yet when arguments about pornography are made, the word is almost always used without further explanation—as if we all “know it when we see it.”

During the summer of 2010, I was called to be a witness for the defense in the federal obscenity case brought by the Department of Justice (DOJ) against pornographer John Stagliano and his company Evil Angel; two adult films that I had performed in were part of the indictment. These were films that showed consenting adults in sexual performances that were often lighthearted and joyful—in which the performers are frequently smiling and laughing—images very different from what most people assume when they hear the phrase “obscenity prosecution.” This prosecution represented an aggressive leap on the part of the DOJ, and it would have had far-reaching impact on the adult film industry if the government had been successful. Ultimately, the government was not. I mention this trial only because it was, for me, a stark and terrifying reminder of the real harm incurred by a national discourse that fails to distinguish between matters of ethics and matters of taste.

Explicit adult imagery is, of course, not for everyone. There are plenty of people who would rather never look at porn. That should be their right. But there are also many adults for whom pornography is part of a healthy sex life. And there are adults who’ve found that pornography provides a positive view of their own sexuality that is the antithesis of what they’ve found in other forms of public media. This is true for women, but it is also true for queer people, kinky people, and every other form of alternative sexual identity. In order for ethically made, high-quality, aesthetically and sociopolitically valuable adult imagery to continue to be made, it is essential that we develop more nuanced, discerning, and thoughtful cultural discourse about both pornography and sex.

After reading the recent crop of antiporn books and articles, I’m left with the impression that many of the people in this country start from a place of assumption that to work in pornography is, for women, a fate close to death. It seems to me that this attitude is directly related to attitudes that describe sexually active women as “fallen” or “disgraced.” That women’s sexuality is still viewed as nothing more than currency for gaining a marriage partner, that women are still considered the “gatekeepers”
in heterosexual relationships, does the double evil of making women responsible for every sex act that occurs—consensual or not—and somehow simultaneously disallows the possibility that they might ever have physical desires of their own.

Women are constantly being told by studies and surveys, by newspapers and magazines, that they want sex less than men want sex. But I have yet to see a survey or study that takes into account the dramatic difference in social consequences for men and women in consenting to a sexual act—and the effect that the expectation of social consequences might have on the self-reporting of desire. Women can never gain equal social footing as long as their sexual desires are not viewed as equal to men’s desires.

A recent article in the online magazine
Slate
was titled “Sex is Cheap: Why Young Men Have the Upper Hand in Bed, Even When They’re Failing in Life.” I won’t be the first to point out that the major flaw in Mark Regnerus’s article is his underlying assumption that all heterosexual sex outside of marriage can be classified as “pre-marital,” and that a young woman’s ultimate goal and reason for having sex with a young man is to ensnare him in a long-term relationship.
¹
Pair that assertion with the idea that young men’s desire is for “access to sex without too many complications or commitments” (according to Regnerus), and you have a twisted and outdated concept of gendered sexual attitudes that affects the way scientific research is done (see the study Regnerus quotes in his article for an example of this) and ultimately affects the way young people view the “normalcy” of their own desires.

Gendered sexual stereotypes such as these are both the cause and effect (in a maddening chicken-and-egg scenario) of the unbelievably manipulative coverage that porn performers receive in mainstream media. Watch Diane Sawyer interview Belladonna or Tyra Banks interview Sasha Grey—pay attention to the music and voiceovers, the questions they are asked.

Let me just pick one tiny moment out of the sensationalist opera of these interviews: At one point, Sawyer says in voiceover that Belladonna, in her work as a porn performer, contracted chlamydia, “a disease that can cause sterility.” All porn performers in the “heterosexual” industry (which includes performances of both heterosexual and lesbian sex)
²
are tested every four weeks, at minimum, and would (unlike most sexually active adults) learn very quickly that they had a contracted an STD, would not continue to work, and would be treated long before that STD could cause the long-term effects Sawyer describes.
³
Sawyer’s attitude is
just one example of the illogical hysteria that permeates both pop culture and news media reactions to porn.

This hysteria is a result of the ubiquitous, gendered sexual myth and stereotyping that both men and women have been fed for hundreds of years. To paraphrase what I told my kindergarten teacher in 1986: If a woman isn’t trusted to make decisions about her own body, if she isn’t allowed that autonomy by law or societal attitude, how can she be seen as autonomous in the rest of her life? This is a question that applies not only to the women who make pornography, but to the many women who purchase and consume adult materials, and who have been emboldened to claim empowered sexual desire as a part of their healthy adulthood.

To further respond to Sawyer’s fears regarding health and safety in the adult industry—fears more recently represented in the public policy hearings led by the AIDS Healthcare Foundation and the Los Angeles County Health Department—the needs of adult-industry workers will never be adequately addressed as long as those workers are seen as exploited victims. The rhetoric around this conversation too often paints the performers themselves as less-than-human caricatures who have no sense of the risks their job involves. Long-term performers have more awareness of the health risks of their jobs and the kinds of regulations that would increase their on-the-job health and safety than anyone outside of the industry (as opposed to the kinds of regulations that would further drive the industry into secrecy and away from the already limited reaches of legal accountability). This is one of the arenas in which feminist sex workers are fighting for visibility—in the battle to separate the needs of consenting sex workers from the needs of trafficking victims—people who are actually being exploited and coerced.

Until these kinds of distinctions are made in the public discourse, it is unlikely that they will be reflected in public health policy, the law, or social, anthropological, and biological research. The amorphous monolith we call “pornography” is just a microcosm reflective of, and influenced by, the attitudes toward sexuality held by society as a whole. The queer and feminist movements’ most powerful rhetoric has always been that of freedom of choice and self-definition. Sexual desire and sexual identity are absolutely essential to the freely defined self. Images that explicitly express the vast multiplicity of those desires communicate something larger and more basic to humanity than can be put into words. If those images should be criticized, they should be criticized individually, with consideration for both the context of their appearance and the context of their creation. Pornography is not one thing. It is a
living, breathing genre and represents the creative will of hundreds of people on any given day. Many of the people behind the creation of those images are feminists, and our will is both powerful and far-reaching.

Notes

1
. Also see Violet Blue, “Why That Slate Magazine Article Pissed You Off (And Why You Should be Livid),”
Tiny Nibbles,
February 26, 2011,
http://www.tinynibbles.com/blogarchives/2011/02/why-that-slate-article-pissed-you-off-and-why-you-should-be-livid.html
.

2
. In the gay male porn industry, which includes performances of male/male sex as well as bisexual scenes, condom use is mandatory, but STI testing is not.

3
. For an extended conversation on this topic, read Ernest Greene, “Latest HIV-in-Porn Panic: Rumor Control Re-opens for Business,”
The Blog of Pro-Porn Activism,
June 14, 2009,
http://bppa.blogspot.com/2009/06/latest-hiv-in-porn-panic-rumor-control.html
.

Pornography: A Black Feminist Woman Scholar’s Reconciliation