XXX: A Woman's Right to Pornography (22 page)

Their concern has been taken and used as a battering ram by the right."

I asked Bobby whether she thought the polarization in feminism was getting worse or better?

"I tend to see it leaning toward the pro-sex side, but it may be that I live in California, which is sort of a cutting-edge force, bringing innovative ideas into NOW. For example, this past year, I was able to get a resolution on sexual harassment out of the California State Board that basically took the same position I did. It was a very strong statement about how women are not inherently offended by sexual imagery."

Bobby blamed some of the polarization on how the media has chosen to present the feminist movement.

"The media, for their own reasons, have acknowledged the voices of women such as Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin. They have ignored the many women on the other side from Priscilla Alexander to Nan Hunter to porn stars. In my darkest moments, I almost think it is a plot against women . . .."

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I suggested it was a plot for sensationalism-the type of furor that Dworkin stirs up when she proclaims "Every man is a rapist." Bobby threw back, "I think the statement Àll women love sex' should be every bit as sensational."

More thoughtfully, she added: "We have to understand the potential there is [in pornography] for women to speak about ourselves. This has not been tapped. It is only just beginning. If we close the doors to sexual expression, we will never find the connection between sex and our power."

She and I quickly agreed that this power would come as the result of women asserting themselves in porn and insisting on the power of producing and directing. But even without this, Bobby assured me that the industry was responding to the pressure of social criticism: "For example, about fifteen years ago, it was sort of obligatory to have a rape scene, even if it obviously was a fantasy rape. It is no longer there. There were scenes women found offensive or crude-like being called `bitch' in the throes of passion. Most of that is gone. There is a sensitivity to complaints and a fear that if there are too many complaints, legal action will be taken under the guise of obscenity. You have to remember that under Reagan and Bush a lot of people in the industry went to jail for sending a videotape across the wrong state line. Now the industry is going to an opposite extreme in self-censorship. Pressure from women, inside and outside the industry, is a part of this."

I asked whether most women in the industry consider themselves to be feminists.

"Most of them don't, no. They believe in equality. But like many mainstream American women, they don't see themselves as bra burning and man hating. They have bought into that media stereotype. Yet when you ask them how they feel on issues affecting women, they come down on the side of women's rights."

These are the same women who receive the least protection and respect from society. I mentioned reading an account in the Cal-Act Newsletter about porn actresses whom the police had terrorized. I assumed the incident had come from the "bad-old days" (twenty years ago) when porn was clearly illegal. Bobby quickly corrected me: "That was less than ten years ago, here in the state of California. It was during a period in which everyone assumed pornography was legal and so they were shooting a lot of it. Then the Los Angeles DA got the creative idea of charging the producers with pimping and pandering, the actors and actresses with prostitution. On that basis, the police raided sets and arrested people."

In the face of such persecution, women in porn desperately need protection not only-or even primarily-from exploitative producers, but from the police and court system. A first step toward such protection is for women to demand to work only on the basis of contracts. As it stands, the only contracts that exist are releases, which protect the producers by guaranteeing that the women are over eighteen years old. Bobby expanded on this: "Contracts will help a lot, and they are something that may well happen over the next few years.

I know there is a consciousness out there that is open to those things. And as it becomes more common, the established people can say `Well, I won't work without a contract.' There already are those who are 'contract people,' but usually that means they are signed to a long-term contract, which might be considered indentured servitude. Although they do get a lot of money.

A union would be the best sort of contract we could get."

NINA HARTLEY

Being new to pornography, I did not know Nina Hartley was a superstar. I first heard of her in a political context. Nina was one of the Erotic Eleven-eleven women who were arrested in January 1993 in Las Vegas on charges of felony lesbianism and pandering.

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The charges resulted from their participation in a live sex act that took place at an after-hours fund-raiser held by the "adult video industry." Most of the women arrested wanted to fight the charges, but they were intimidated by the probability of a conviction, which carried a jail term of six to twelve years. Unfortunately, the man who videotaped the fund-raiser had turned his tapes over to the grand jury, so there was no question that the women had engaged in public sex with each other.

In a phone conversation, Nina described the doubts with which she had entered into the performance that had caused so much grief. The benefit act had been set up to raise money for a good cause. Since everyone in the audience was of age and in the porn industry, the performers were urged to spice up the show. Feeling uncomfortable with a "no-limits" situation, Nina opted for the relatively innocuous role of standing onstage and describing into a microphone how to make love to a woman. Other women acted out her descriptions. Unfortunately, an undercover cop was in the audience; the women were arrested.

Nina characterized the treatment of the women in prison as similar to that of "animals on display in a zoo." She added, "The looking-down-their-noses from the female cops was palpable. They were triple gloving before they touched us because we were brought in on prostitution charges.

One woman was body searched in a non-private area, not taken to a private room to be cavity searched.... One woman is a recovering junkie and, because of her arrest on prostitution charges, they took blood samples to test for HIV without her consent. She was saying, `Don't use that arm, use this arm,' but they disregarded her and she had a tremendous swelling on her arm for several days thereafter because they used a damaged vein.... I didn't appreciate that they allowed our real names to be posted, which, for women in our line of work, can be very dangerous."

Eventually, the prosecutor agreed to drop the charges down to a misdemeanor
if
the women pleaded "guilty" and
if
they made a "voluntary" donation of $20,000 to local charities. People in the industry banded together and raised the "donation." But the women still face tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid legal bills.

The repercussions echo on. For example, Nina was recently refused entry into Canada-where she often works as a dancer because of the misdemeanor conviction. On lawyer's advice, Nina crossed the border as an ordinary citizen and met with fans, without receiving pay. Despite these precautions, Canadian immigration held her in jail for three days and then, after a hearing, a judge gave her thirty days to leave the country.

Fortunately, Nina Hartley's career can weather such storms. Best known as an actress and feature dancer, Nina has recently made the leap into directing.

I caught up with Nina in Atlanta, where she was on the dance circuit. Nina spends two weeks of every month on the road, which she describes as being "too much." Nina began as an erotic dancer over a decade ago while she was going to school to become a nurse. A strong exhibitionist urge led her (and her husband, then boyfriend) to check out a local club, where she was quickly offered a job. Nina had discovered her true vocation.

Nina became involved in the video industry because of what she calls "a long-standing fantasy of creating explicit adult material." This, in turn, sprang from the radical literature she read in her youth, such as
The Joy of Sex
and the feminist classic
Our Bodies, Ourselves.
Nina speaks of sixties feminism as the intellectual "cradle" from which she emerged. Feminism convinced her: "If it's consensual, it's okay," and "Sex is essentially good."

Recently, she directed the video
Nina Hartley's Book of Love.
She also produced the first two in a series of educational/entertainment films. From Adam and Eve, they are titled,
Nina Hartley's
Guide to Better Cunnilingus and Fellatio.
Her goal is to infuse pornography with a fresh 90

approach that provides it with a larger context of music and movement, body humor, and theatrical flair. Perhaps even a two-character sexually graphic play.

These ambitions will be difficult to fulfill, since "home porn" and inexpensive videos seem to be dominating the industry at the expense of high-budget movies, such as the classic
Behind the
Green Door
with its crafted script and exquisite sets. Videotape has democratized porn and caused a drop-off in artistry, simply because producers no longer have to be filmmakers to rake in the profits. The chains of adult theaters that formerly existed to promote large-budget films-e.g. the Pussycat chain-are almost a memory. Moreover, films like I Am Curious
Yellow
were made two or three decades ago, when women were allowed to be adventurous and kinky. The whole world has become a little bit meaner and less tolerant than it was a few decades ago.

I asked Nina the obligatory question: Have you ever been coerced into a pornographic act?

"No, never, no, goodness." She added, "Like bosses everywhere, some will push at you until you say no. There have been situations where people are emotionally vulnerable and taken advantage of, yes." This is particularly true of the "women who knock on our doors every day, asking if they can be in videos.

"I feel bad for the women who get into pornography not for the fun, but because they seek only economic gain," she continued, "because they are the ones who will be hurt by the experience.

They will feel exploited, used, and abused even though they are responsible for putting themselves out there. To do a highly stigmatized activity with a permanent record just for the money ... this is what causes the real damage."

Women in porn
have
to love what they doing because it is a tough way to make a living. In fact, it is not possible for women to earn a truly decent living just by appearing in videos, because they have to work too many days. Moreover, they usually have to work either in Los Angeles or New York, where living is expensive.

So they get exposure through videos and then take their show on the road, where a feature act can make as much as $6,000 to $10,000 a week. But if they don't get pleasure out of their dancing -if it is just a matter of money-Nina thinks they are selling themselves short. She routinely counsels women who are unhappy with the industry to take a month or two off in order to think about where they are in life and whether they want to continue in pornography.

She calls this her "mother-hen rap." I asked her how she would counsel someone like Linda Lovelace, whom many in the industry seem to dismiss as a liar. "I wouldn't dismiss her. That's how she experienced things. But I would tell her to take responsibility for the situation in which she found herself."

I wondered aloud about violence in pornography. I told her I had been searching through movies, TV channels, and magazines without being able to find anything really offensive. It is difficult to find nasty pornography. Yet I keep reading radical feminists who claim that seventy-five percent, or some comparably huge chunk, of pornography is violence, containing scenes of rape or torture. "They are out to lunch on that," Nina replied, "especially on rape scenes; they were passe by '80, '81.

"Ever since the early nineties, when all the obscenity prosecutions were going on, the industry has been paranoid about censoring itself. People have stopped doing anything that might be objectionable. For example, some producers ask actresses not to say Òh God, Oh God' when they come in sex scenes.

"Nor do they dare to show a scene that remotely resembles nonconsensual sex. So you have bondage movies which look ridiculous," Nina explained. "Bondage is a pre-orgasmic experience, but most producers will no longer couple it with sex for fear of the hysteria over `sex leading to 91

violence.' Producers think they have to divide fetish activity from sexual activity. So you have bondage portrayed as something apart from foreplay and sex, which makes the people involved in it seem even more perverted than they did before."

Everything in porn seemed to be skewed to conform to outside pressures. I asked Nina how she, as a porn actress, was treated by mainstream feminists. "As long as the women have an okay attitude about sex to begin with, I am usually treated respectfully. Once they meet me, they realize I am not an idiot, not a sexual-abuse survivor. I'm just a person who can talk about weather, and cars, and kids, and politics. They realize there is another side to this business and that not every woman is oppressed who's in it."

In fact, a lot of Nina's fans are women, whom she tells to take responsibility for their own orgasms. "This is the most powerful thing any woman can do. Take responsibility for the timing of lovemaking, the mood that's set..." Here she sighs deeply. "But taking responsibility requires a generous heart, and women, right now, are very, very angry. Many do not seem to have the generosity in their hearts that is necessary to ... for want of better words ... to honor Aphrodite.

They are killing their own well of life."

This remark, of course, drifts directly into a discussion of the antiporn/antisex tendencies of modern feminism. Nina sees this as a response to men. Antiporn feminists actively hate men and blame them for what they see as the "victimization of women." According to Nina, "Pornography, as they understand the word, is the ultimate personification of everything that is bad. Actually, their response to porn is a throwback to Judeo-Christian ethics. A true feminist is a compassionate person, who tries to encourage women to speak their own `truths.' "