The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (47 page)

These shots of the female performers immediately displace our guide or host as the center or authority of sexual knowledge and experience. Taormino summarizes and provides transitions, allowing the performers to speak for themselves. Far from the passive sex objects portrayed elsewhere in the media (or the breathing protoplasmic medical illustrations seen in the hygiene and white-coater films), the women share their highly distinctive lived experiences. “We need to look at the whole picture,” says Taormino. “Listen to women talking about their experiences and the feelings that go along with them.” The male performers describe their observations on the varied physical signs and expressions of female orgasm and encourage viewers to pay close attention to their female lovers. Nowhere is there mention of a deep wine color. Like the white-coated doctors of old, Tristan presides over schematic illustrations of female anatomy, but these are stylized, playful, and artistic renderings and include the now de rigueur vulva puppet and a decidedly non-Brödel-like marker drawing of the deep structures of the clitoris with casual but neat handwritten indices.

The third scene of the film between Evanni Solei and Evan Stone completely dispenses with traditional choreography, blocking, and cinematography. After she tells Tristan that she needs a very slow buildup and that she likes Evan because he is funny (which he demonstrates by telling us that coaxing a female orgasm is like fly fishing), he kisses her and rubs his body on hers for several minutes. A full four minutes out of the twelve-minute scene show him giving her cunnilingus while stimulating her G-spot at a slowly but steadily increasing rate. The multiple cameras do not alternate between genital close ups and facial reaction shots; rather, each angle emphasizes either Evanni’s whole body response or captures tiny minutiae of her changing facial expression: At one point, we see her tensed up face release for just a second into a tiny smile.

It is not until she experiences her first orgasm, three quarters through the scene, that Evan’s penis makes an appearance. There is no fellatio, and intromission and intercourse occurs only to accent her enjoyment of clitoral stimulation using a Hitachi magic wand. We see no visible ejaculation, and the scene concludes with the viewer unsure if the look of closed-eye bliss on Evan’s face is one of orgasmic release or delight in Evanni’s second orgasm. Other parts of
The Ultimate Guide to Female Orgasms,
particularly the scene between James Deen and Taormino’s “rough sex” muse Adrianna Nicole, feature the loud, pounding sex to which porn fans have become accustomed, but even these scenes dispense with mathematical recombination of positions and the alternating genital close-ups and facial reaction shots and focus instead on the women’s moment-by-moment “physical, psychological, emotional, and even spiritual” experience of sex.

At the time of this writing, one of the more popular porn-related websites is Make Love Not Porn (
makelovenotporn.com
) a site run by web entrepreneur Cindy Gallop, in which readers are invited to send their observations on the difference between “Porn World” and “Real World.” Gallop, who dates younger “Gen Next” men, discovered to her disappointment while in bed with many of them, that in the absence of effective and comprehensive sex education, hardcore pornography has become the de facto resource for young people learning about human sexual response. Instead of censorship, which is pointless and doomed to failure, she suggests a real-world counterbalance that engages with (often through direct mockery) rather than suppresses the reductive, repetitive, and uni-dimensional phallocentric sexuality on display in much commercial pornography. In a 2010 address at the conference L2: Generation Next, Gallop stated, “I believe that if more people were having more sex and more better sex, the world would be a much happier place and we would be further down the path to achieving world peace. More blow jobs, less world wars.”
²³

During a time in which the struggle over women’s control of their bodies has become fierce and urgent and as the Religious Right continues its concerted and remorseless effort to halt comprehensive sex education, implement draconian censorship laws, impede marriage equality, and roll back women’s access to birth control and right to abortion services, learning about greater sexual pleasure would seem to some a misplaced priority: In the first six months of 2011, states enacted 162 new provisions related to reproductive health and rights. The eighty abortion restrictions enacted that year more than doubled the previous record of
thirty-four abortion restrictions enacted in 2005.
²⁴
Universal health care, a key goal of the women’s health movement, remained a distant hope.

But the sexual pleasure and autonomy of women has been the major battleground in a war that has been fought on remarkably similar terrain for 150 years. The power to see, experience, and even imagine that pleasure has been wrenched from institutional controls for only a few short years through women educating themselves and each other through discussion groups, books, films, videos, and the Internet. Feminist pornographers are the next generation in this movement.

Notes

1
. Chad Livengood, “Lawmaker Barred From Speaking After ‘Vagina’ Comment,”
The Detroit News,
June 12, 2012,
http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20120614/POLITICS02/206140467#ixzz20qEbTsXk
.

2
. For accounts of Comstock’s career and other censorship movements martialed against the post-Civil War publishing industry, see Nicola Kay Beisel,
Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998) and Paul Boyer,
Purity in Print: Book Censorship in America from the Gilded Age to the Computer Age,
2nd ed. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002).

3
. See Janet Brodie,
Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth Century America
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 259–74 and 288–91.

4
. Dick Schultheiss and Udo Jonas, “Max Brödel (1870–1941) and Howard A. Kelly (1858–1943)—Urogynecology and the Birth of Modern Medical Illustration,”
European Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology and Reproductive Biology
86 (1999): 113.

5
. Ibid., 115.

6
. This illustration is from Schultheiss and Jonas, 114.

7
. Eric Schaefer,
Bold! Daring! Shocking! True! A History of Exploitation Films, 1919–1959
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999).

8
. Schaefer,
Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!,
197.

9
. At many roadshow engagements of the film, the film was stopped after Lois is rushed to the hospital and into the front of the auditorium strode “the eminent hygiene commentator, Mr. Curtis Hayes, in person” (in fact one of as many as a dozen fellows appearing under that name with different traveling packages of the picture). “Hayes” then made an impassioned pitch for two slender volumes,
Father and Son
and
Mother and Daughter,
available for one dollar each, as “nurses” circulated among the crowd.

10
. David Lerner, “‘White Coaters’ at the Intersection of Sexploitation and Pornography,” lecture, Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, New Orleans, March 2011.

11
. Many of Dante’s
Film Bulletin
reviews were later reprinted in issues of
Video Watchdog
magazine under the running title, “Joe Dante’s Fleapit Flashbacks.” The review of
Man and Wife
appeared in
Video Watchdog
no. 83 (May 2002): 30.

12
. A synoptic account of many of these critiques and the movement they launched can be found in Sandra Morgen,
Into Our Own Hands: The Women’s Health Movement in the United States, 1969–1990
(Piscataway, New Jersey, 2002).

13
. Boston Women’s Health Collective,
Our Bodies, Ourselves,
2nd ed. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), xix.

14
. Ibid., xvii.

15
. Ibid., 589–91.

16
. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English,
For Her Own Good: 150 Years of Expert’s Advice to Women
(Garden City, NY, 1978), quoted in Boston Women’s Health Collective, 594.

17
. For an account of the formation of the company, see Phillip Harvey,
The Government vs. Erotica: The Siege of Adam and Eve
(New York: Prometheus Books, 2001), 43–44.

18
. Allan C. Carlson, “Comstockery, Contraception, and the Family: The Remarkable Achievements of an Anti-Vice Crusader,”
The Family in America
23, no.1,
http://www.profam.org/pub/fia/fia.2301.htm
.

19
. Xaviera Hollander with Robin Moore and Yvonne Dunleavy,
The Happy Hooker: My Story
(New York: Dell Books, 1972).

20
. Sheldon Ranz, “Interview: Nina Hartley,”
Shmate: A Magazine of Progressive Jewish Thought,
no. 22 (Spring 1989): 15–19. Reprinted online at
The Smackdog Chronicles (Ver. 2.6),
http://www.redgarterclub.com/SDChronBlog2dot5/about/nina-hartley-shmate-interview-pt1/
.

21
. For an interview with Cleis Press founders Felice Newman and Frédérique Delacoste, see the Cleis website at
http://www.cleispress.com/features/about.php
.

22
. Linda Williams,
Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible
” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 27–32.

23
. Cindy Gallop, “Make Love Not Porn,” lecture, L2: Generation Next Conference, New York, NY, May 14, 2010,
http://fora.tv/2010/05/14/Cindy_Gallop_Make_Love_Not_Porn
.

24
. Guttmacher Institute, “States Enact Record Number of Abortion Restrictions in First Half of 2011,” News In Context, July 13 2011,
http://www.guttmacher.org/media/inthenews/2011/07/13/index.html
.

Calling the Shots: Feminist Porn in Theory and Practice

TRISTAN TAORMINO

Tristan Taormino
(
tristantaormino.com
) is an award-winning author, columnist, editor, sex educator, radio host, and feminist pornographer. She is the author of seven books including
The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women
and
True Lust: Adventures in Sex, Porn and Perversion.
She runs the adult film production company Smart Ass Productions. She has directed and produced twenty-four adult films, including the groundbreaking series based on real female kink fantasies, Rough Sex and the Expert Guide sex education series, which she created for Vivid Entertainment. The winner of multiple Adult Video News (AVN) and Feminist Porn Awards, she was the first female director to win an AVN award for Best Gonzo Movie for the first film in her reality series
Chemistry.
She received the Trailblazer Award for Lifetime Achievement at the Feminist Porn Awards in 2010. She is the host of
Sex Out Loud,
a weekly radio show on The VoiceAmerica Talk Radio Network. She was a columnist for
The Village Voice
for nearly ten years and writes a column for
Hustler’s Taboo.
She was the founding editor of the Lambda Literary Award-winning series
Best Lesbian Erotica
and is editor of twenty-five anthologies. She’s written for a multitude of publications from
Yale Journal of Law and Feminism
to
Penthouse,
and served as editor of
On Our Backs.
She has appeared on CNN, HBO’s
Real Sex, The Howard Stern Show, Loveline, Ricki Lake,
MTV, Oxygen, MSNBC, Fox News, The Discovery Channel, and on over fifty radio shows. She lectures at top colleges and universities and teaches sex and relationship workshops around the world.