WWW [Violet Blue writes on sfgate.com]- Feminist porn. For many, seeing those words together is like putting together the words “comfortable flight,” “lightly scented” and “Bill O’Reilly: journalist.” We now have Jet Blue and Virgin America, not everyone can smell your panty liners, and there’s no debate about the irony of the last bit — but pretty much everyone wants to know, what the hell are porn and feminism doing in bed together?
Some pretty nasty, kinky, shocking, and fun things, if the selections from this year’s Feminist Porn Awards are any indication. The winners were announced April 7 and included local bondage model (and porn performer, producer, art gallery owner and self-identified feminist) Madison Young (madisonbound.com). Winning Hottest Kink Film for her debut film, the ultra-stylish Madison Bound Production “Bondage Boob Tube,” Young summed up her stance on feminism, porn, sex work and the raging debate between anti-porn feminism and pro-porn feminists in her acceptance speech by paraphrasing Emma Goldman: “If I can’t f—, it’s not my revolution.”
I’m not going to say who’s playing top or bottom in that statement, but feminism and porn have been like Crisco and condoms for decades, and feminist positions (ahem) on porn are diverse. They often boil down to the notions that porn is degrading to women, abusive, encourages rape and violence against women, and reinforces sexual domination, coercion and humiliation of women. This is much like the position of religious fundies, who toss on top a little cherry of porn as destroyer of heterosexual families and marriage, encourager of serial killers, creator of child molesters and endorser of the sin of lust (that’s sexual pleasure to you and me). Many feminists loudly argue that porn-cum-sex-work is bad at its core values, and that any woman involved must be damaged, drugged, forced or worse.
Except for all the cool-headed women currently identifying as feminist and doing sex work and loving porn, like Young, Nina Hartley (nina.com), Carol Queen, Susie Bright (susiebright.blogs.com/), all the women behind Spread magazine, plus oodles more.
The whole notion that a girl can get off watching porn, be in it, make it, and view sex work as positive — and be feminist — remains confusing for many. Women like Young have their politics about women and sex down pat; meanwhile ever-increasing thousands of women watch and enjoy all kinds of porn for personal gratification. Not because their boyfriends read an article in Maxim that gave them 10 easy steps to convince her to watch “I’ve Never Done This Before No. 48.”
Because women get off on explicit sexual imagery, and there’s not only data and studies to back that statement, but hoards of girls with vibrators in one hand and a mouse in the other voting with each click on RedTube.com or Fleshbot.com. The privacy of the Internet has changed how we women enjoy and consume our sex toys — and porn is one of those toys, thank you very much. And we totally know who we’re exploiting when we watch gay male porn. Um, the gay male feminists, of course.
Trying to decode these mixed messages is like a game of “pin the label on the feminist,” which I refuse to play because I know I’ll trip and stumble and blindly pin my tranny sex worker sister right in the fake boob. Or water bra, also known as a Tenderloin Tsunami.
The Feminist Porn Awards put a whole new exciting spin on the women and porn, feminism and sex work orgy of conflicting ideas. Established in 2006, Canadian women-run sex toy store (one of the few left in the world) Good For Her felt like the rest of us. They were sick of stupid, patronizing, sexist, racist and cliche porn from most mainstream outlets, and tired of seeing crappy porn honored by nepotistic circle-jerk porn stereotype parades like the AVN Awards, especially when there was a vociferous, emergent trend of quality, realistic, respectful and hot porn coming from outside the mainstream industry.
Let’s not forget: Most mainstream porn is generally racist and sexist; it’s full of sex acts people don’t actually do when they really get off, and crazy-unsafe behavior. It’s supposed to be fantasy, but much of mainstream porn plays on viewer’s assumptions that sex is bad and shameful — the male “raincoater” slinking into porn stores is actually, sadly, the target consumer for mainstream porn. The attitudes are prevalent, but just as dated as Jay Leno making fun of gay people.
Seeing these porno-geezers headed to die off like the dinosaurs and the DVD, the Feminist Porn Awards wanted to participate in the growing popularity of sex-positive, non-formula porn. Porn director and sex-ed author Tristan Taormino contextualized this new feminist porn beastie that embraces sex for the new millennium, saying the FPAs feel “like the Independent Spirit Awards of the adult film world, where people creating independent, thoughtful or unconventional porn were acknowledged and celebrated.”
But “sex-positive” and “feminist” are catchphrases that might make it seem like a shy, soft-focus film fest. Quite the opposite, ma’am: Take one look at edgy, hardcore winners like “Bondage Boob Tube,” local dyke and trans flick “In Search of the Wild Kingdom” and mainstream winners like Vivid Video’s “Jenna Jameson is the Masseuse” and Tristan Taormino’s “Chemistry” (also Vivid Video), and it’s a range of diversity in sex acts from the extreme to the whimsical, explicit and sublime. Still confused, I asked Alison Lee, Manager of Good For Her exactly WTF is a “feminist porn film” anyway? She tells me:
“A porn film can be classified as feminist, I think, as soon as women are taken into account as viewers, and that as actors within the film, their own desires are taken into account. This means basically showing that women have just as much right to erotic entertainment as men do, and their desires and pleasure is important, too. I don’t think that feminist porn has to show women at all though, and there is a growing body of excellent smut out there starring trans people (mostly trans men so far) that is looking to show genuine pleasure, consent, and loving relationships outside of the gender binary.
“I think feminists are hungry for erotic entertainment that takes them into account. In the end, we are addressing a growing market, and I hope that more women who don’t like porn take a look at some of our winners to see how things could be different, and that the rest of the porn industry starts taking more of our criteria into account!”
Here, the definition of feminist isn’t anti-male or anti-sex, it’s anti-lame (and is all-inclusive). Rather than award categories like “Starlet of the Year” or “Best Oral Scene,” Good For Her has “Hottest Straight Sex Scene,” “Hottest Fetish/Kink Scene,” “Fiercest Female Orgasm” and “Indie Porn Pioneer.”
Right when I was writing this column, a reader e-mailed me about the depiction of sex workers in the series “Firefly” — as torn apart in a LiveJournal post written by a self-identified feminist. From Joss Whedon, the creator of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Firefly” had a class of sex worker characters called Companions who chose the vocation and were shown as being intelligent, accomplished, educated, well-respected and presumably from good families. Why, the LiveJournal feminist asks, “If a woman had all of these qualities and opportunities then why the f— would she ‘choose’ to be a man’s f— toy?”
Perhaps, like the Hartleys and Youngs and Queens of the world, for a Companion (or porn performer), being a sex toy for the object of your desire can be hot, empowering, rewarding, orgasmic and fun. Or, lucrative and more sport than intimacy. I am not, nor have ever been a porn performer or sex worker, but as a consumer and porn critic I can say with authority that women who don’t really want to be in porn get out fast, quickly replaced by the next ambitious starlet in line who wants to do the job.
At the end of the e-mail about the LiveJournal post, which left my esteemed reader feeling conflicted about being a previously happy, lube-on-the-keyboard female porn consumer, the reader asked me, “I look at you and consider you a positive feminist, promoting positive sex in people’s lives and I don’t understand how someone like you and this woman can be in the same feminist space.”
The answer is, we can’t.