Porn for a Feminist World?

Queer Porn: Savior of Pornography for a Feminist World

by A.W.

Porn has a problem. In the same way that minority individuals feel invisible when there are no representatives of their race, class, or gender expression in mainstream television or film, minority viewers feel ignored, misrepresented, and obscured in the production process of mainstream pornography. Specifically in regards to gender trends, popular porn has done little to stray from the age-old script of masculine superiority and pleasure gained from conquering even the slightly feminine. These trends have been instrumental in polarizing my feminist thought and my developing ideas of sexuality, which are in part inspired by porn consumption. I have heard the arguments of many feminist voices who have ultimately condemned pornography as a hopelessly sexist medium. Even so, the goal of my research is to find American porn's salvation; determine what ways, if any, porn can be reappropriated--assuming that porn has a strict definition and singular function--and beneficial to a post-modern society. I aim to pull the voices of theorists who argue for or against pornography from a distance, the voices of scholars who directly examine pornographic works, and the voices of active-in-the-biz directors and performers into discussion here. While I am probing the medium with feminist tools, I believe that there are distinctions to be made within visual pornography, and (in spare terms) the primary distinction that I will examine is between mainstream pornography made solely for profit and independent porn made for sexuality's sake. Based on a cocktail of my own experience and the findings of interested scholars, the subgenre that I propose as an anti-sexist and anti-homogeneous solution is independent feminist queer porn. Before I delve into this possible solution to porn's complex problem let me first present the problem and the arguments surrounding it.

Here and now, in an era that some scholars call the digital age, video porn is accessible on any device with an internet connection. Porn sites are being optimized for visits on mobile phones, and even with restrictions, people of any age can be exposed to explicit images. What has often come under scrutiny is the power of these images to forcefully gender viewers, particularly within the context of heterosexuality, and support historical inequities through the repetition of practices and reproduction of symbols. Judith Butler describes gender as "performative" and only real as long as it is indeed performed (Butler, 1988, 527). Since gender is dependent upon a set of repeatedly performed acts, it is easy to see how it can be constructed by the sexual acts in porn. For example, in mainstream heterosexual porn the woman is passive and penetrated while the man is active and does the penetrating; this dichotomy of acting/acted upon serves to gender the performers as well as the audience, and limit their expression to discourage action outside of the boundaries set for their performance. As for how this affects our sexual expression within the two-gendered hetero framework, each viewer is assigned one traditional gender role based heavily on their sex, and are subsequently taught to find sexy the traits of the complementary role in the binary system.

Mainstream porn transfers not only an expectation of behaviors to its wide audience but of presentation as well. Feona Attwood says that, in the case of women, porn pushes "conventional forms of representation (the safe,  the thin, and the asexual)" as ideal, and they must live up to this in order to be desirable (Attwood, 2004, 13). What we get are most often images of the augmented, shaved, and petite white female, and this representation of the body has been instrumental in leading women to go as far as to undergo surgery. In her report, "Towards a clean slit: how medicine and notions of normality are shaping female genital aesthetics", Lindy McDougall investigates the growing popularity of genital cosmetic surgeries like labiaplasty, which is the surgical reduction of the labia minora in order to produce a simple and contained genital appearance. She argues that the "altered images" of porn have left the realm of fantasy and infiltrated our views of how a real and normal woman should look (McDougall, 2013, 5). Organic parts are too complex and variable and masculine, while the "clean slit is a marker of appropriate and acceptable femininity." (McDougall, 2013, 4) The efforts to simplify and make interchangeable the bodies of women are aligned with the ideal that females should be asexual, which accounts for the lack of a display of feminine desire and sexuality in porn, an issue that many of the scholars we will look at dissect.

I have been a consumer of internet video pornography for over a decade now and most of my surfing was done as a teenager. My experience can be described as this: at first it was exciting, I was finally learning about sex and seeing things that my parents would never explain to me. Then I noticed the ideals that I couldn't measure up to or ignore, as they were consistently on every page, in every image. Soon after I felt an attack on my femininity unfold; the existence of my desire was contradictory to the singular and rigid femaleness each image dictated to me, and this fact, coupled with the unmistakably male point of view of every video I saw, constructed a masculine site of enjoyment inside my head. I consumed porn from this "male" perspective, deriving my pleasure from the ever-central locus of male orgasm, participating in its fetishization but not able to completely relate. This worked internally uncontested for a while, until I found myself searching for authenticity and a desire that I could fully relate to, as what I now see as my implanted masculine proxy began to fail. I was now an adult very interested in sexuality studies; combing through mainstream content available for female perspectives, but I found every attempt to showcase feminine sexuality to collide with industry constraint, and unfortunately fall short. To me, major studios seemed to keep a cap on the options for women performers in order to hold male desire as the focus and driving force of every scene. I was going to have to give up on heterosexual porn if I wanted a fresh script or to really learn about variant bodies and expression.

Pornography as a form has plenty of critics, and these critics speak of pornography as if it is a monolithic genre, which it for the most part is. While some of the opposition to porn has come from conservative forces rallying against obscenity, much of the battle against porn has been fought by a group of feminists identified as anti-porn feminists. These women held a position "organized around the claim that sexually explicit representation is a form of sexual violence that depends on the objectification of women for its charge." (Attwood,2004 , 7) Clearly these feminists were concerned with the rampant sexism of pornography and the possibility for it to actively combat the social progress made by women up through the 1980s (Schorn, 2012). Major voices of the early anti-pornography movement connected pornography to America's rape culture, saying that "pornography is the theory, and rape the practice." (qtd. in Atwood, 2004, 8). These activists confronted all pornography similarly, leaving no room for the medium to be considered beneficial. This issue was picked up by feminists arguing for pornography, sometimes called anti-antiporn feminists (Kohlehmeinen, 2010) but mostly referred to as sex-positive feminists. Sex positive thinkers examine and accuse the cultural contexts that influence porn rather than the medium itself (Schorn 2012), and discourage the restriction of practices in favor of reforming them to be safe and totally consensual (Schorn 2012). Out of sex positivity has come feminist porn, porn claiming to be made for a feminist world by feminist producers and performers. If porn as a whole is a tainted medium, used to gain profits from the demeaned and subjugated bodies of women, does the idea of feminist pornography become oxymoronic?

Feona Attwood takes steps in her work "Pornography and Objectification" that can help answer this question. She confronts the claims of anti-porn thought by examining the writings of famous anti-porn activist Andrea Dworkin, historian Walter Kendrick, and theorist Laura Kipnis. Attwood boils each writers' work down to one over-reaching claim about pornography. According to her, Dworkin believed that "all pornography objectifies women and everything that objectifies women is pornography." (Attwood, 2004, 10) This is part of what distances me from the movement. While pornography situated in the cultural context of the American industry has been decidedly stubborn about what it showcases and for whom, this definition shows a failure to consider porn that features other genders and porn made to empower women. Dworkin fought for strict federal regulation of all pornography, bringing us to Kendrick who looked specifically at the causes and effects of such regulation. Attwood summarizes Kendrick's findings as "all sexual representations which are subject to regulation become pornography, and all attempts to regulate pornography are an exercise of power over powerless groups, including women." (Attwood 10) Kendrick seems to support sex positivity here, pointing out that it is possible that the censorship of pornographic works can further oppress silenced groups. Whereas Dworkin held to generalizations of groups and media, Kendrick enlightens us that women may not be single-mindedly against pornography, and that regulation will deny pro-porn women exposure to positive porn while aiding in the control of what women can consume. The final view that Attwood discusses is that of Kipnis, whose argument can be summarized as "pornography always transgresses dominant norms of sexuality and gender, and whatever is sexual and transgressive is pornography." (Attwood 10) I would say that this view is correct within the context of an early period in the U.S. as progress in porn has created and informed these "dominant norms", removing mainstream porn as a transgressive medium and exposing it as essentialist and didactic. Attwood recognizes this didactic quality in some sense when she engages Lynne Segal and writes that porn "has become “overburdened with significance” as a culturally established way for speaking about sex, power, and regulation...as an emblem of misogyny and as a symbol of the power of the image." (3) Trends in pornography have permeated our understanding of sexuality and the medium is recognized for its ability to be an agent of culture and instill ideals in a mass audience. In the end, Attwood leaves us with an attractive idea that sexual display might just be a source of power for the under-represented, supporting the reappropriation of the sexual image as potentially powerful (14-15).

It has been said that "today sexual pleasure is far too important a commodity for women not to seek their own desire and agency in it." (Williams, 1993, 130) Johanna Schorn has examined well this idea of reappropriation, or margin-dwellers making a porn of their own. Schorn examines feminist women in major production positions as they display power by taking the established system, flipping the script or flat-out destroying it to create a better one. She intently argues for the use of pornography to change damaging cultural systems:

"While it is undeniably true that we live in a heteronormative patriarchal society that mandates certain ways of sexual expressions and does not generally place much of a focus on consent or equality, it should also be possible for individuals to experience their sexuality and pleasure in the way that feels most intuitive to them...in the specific example of pornography [one of the ways to ensure a safe and healthy context] is through breaking apart the hegemonically phallocentric structure of the porn industry and through producing and distributing material that gives a “realistic” and more inclusive view of human sexuality in general and female sexual agency in particular." (Schorn, 2012, 1-2)

Schorn looks at the work of feminist porn director Tristan Taormino and feminist genderqueer performer Jiz Lee for examples of the realistic and female empowerment. Taormino is seen as one of the most prolific directors of feminist porn, with an emphasis on educating viewers and giving performers a stage to express themselves and experiment on (Schorn 4). While Schorn describes one of Taormino's erotic sex education titles in her article, I'd like to describe one of her films that I saw a few years ago, which was revolutionary to me. The 2009 film Rough Sex starts off with interviews of two pretty successful performers in the mainstream industry. These interviews are not the usual set of leading questions ending with descriptions of how the woman will end up pleasing the man, but actual inquiries into the real interests and dislikes of both the female and male performer. The interviews were filmed individually and edited together, switching between the performers' answers to the same questions. What struck me the most about this film was, after the interview segment ended and the scene was beginning, there was an on-camera negotiation between the performers of what they wanted and what would not take place. It was a very real construction of a safe and consensual context, with the individuals' idea of proper boundaries set up. To me this was extremely educational and encouraging, showing that women, just as much as men, should be aware of their bodies and boundaries and should clearly express those boundaries to their partners before physical intimacy. I had not seen that before in any of the porn videos I'd come across online. Schorn explains the vast majority of porn that I had been exposed to as "the kind of mainstream pornography that is overwhelmingly  heterosexist, that is focused on phallocentric power and pleasure,  that perpetuates “unhealthy” ideas about women and sexuality and that supports the image of the ideal woman as surgically  altered and sexually subservient." (6)

The other feminist that Schorn features in her article is Jiz Lee, a genderqueer pornographer with a "sex-positive activist agenda." (Schorn 5) Lee is a part of the independent and queer porn production company Pink and White Productions, which produces both the online Crash Pad series that Schorn examines, and Queerporn.tv that I will examine later. The Crash Pad, Schorn explains, is set up as a single and secret location where couples or groups of queer-identified people go to have sex that "breaks with the heteronormative and often sexist traditions of [pornography]." (5) The series is a prime example of a more inclusive and powerful brand of porn that, not always featuring cisgendered women, does not deny the existence nor expression of female sexuality in favor of another. What, though, is queer porn exactly, and what power of image does it hold compared to that of mainstream porn?

Before we explore queer porn, let's first examine what queer means. Queer has a long history in the U.S. of being used as a pejorative term against gay or lesbian individuals, targeting them for being different or against the norm. Reclaimed and re-signified by a gender variant and sexually variant group, queer has come to mean something more than sexual identity--it denotes having a political stance against heteronormativity and what Butler calls the compulsory heterosexuality that is dominant in a binary system such as ours (Butler 1988). Queer theory has inspired a global movement against social hegemonies and norms, and Scott Gunther looks at queerness and its history through American and French contexts. According to Gunther, though queer has taken a variety of situational meanings within other cultures, "it refers to a flexible identity that's constantly in motion,  constantly becoming, constantly transgressing...First, to be "queer" is to be against assimilationism." (Gunther, 2005, 1) Jiz Lee may be one of the contemporary American queers that Gunther describes as opening a new theoretical space (Gunther 2). This space is a space in which "desire is not only  considered primary, but autonomous. As an autonomous force," he explains, "desire cannot be understood as socially or historically  determined." (Gunther 2) Desire is therefore individual to every person and cannot be constructed. However, forces like patriarchy and heteronormativity can function to alter or suppress desires. Queerness is then set up as a political contender to the dominant script of porn, and activists live very aware of this potential. Regarding the power of queer imagery to invoke change, Jiz Lee has expressed that they "think explicit queer sexuality on film will permeate the adult industry by opening dialogues about gender, sexuality, and sexual acts." (qtd. in Schorn, 2012, 4)

Queer porn is small and independent--not nearly the billion-dollar industry that the mainstream porn of California's San Fernando Valley boasts (Whisnant 2009)--and seems to thoroughly be its antithesis based on who makes it and for whom. "The sexual subject in porn can be seen as representative of the national subject of the United States; the position and power of the white male subject is reinforced through performances of domination over people of marginalized gender, sexual and race identities." (Seise, 2010, 22) Queer production companies, like Queerporn.tv, strive to focus on a more inclusive idea of the subject through the performers involved. According to the website's Manifesto, QPTV vows to "showcase sex that people want to perform as opposed to the sex that we expect audiences [sic] want to see." (queerporn.tv) Their definition of queer porn is "porn that is directed and produced by queer people, depicting queer performers engaged in queer sex acts. Associated with, political consciousness, authenticity and artful independent production." (queerporn.tv) Upon entering the website one can see performers from a wide range of race groups, with an even wider range of gender identities. Each performer has a bio page, listing their preffered pronouns, gender identities (showing that an individual can possess more than one!), and what makes them queer. This lends to each performer being presented as a real person whose sexual journies they've shared for us to follow. One aspect of the company that encouraged me the most is the equal presence of trans identified men and women, who are unfortunately marginalized even within the already marginalized LGBTQ community in America. Allowing all these queer individuals a space and stage to express their sexualities is empowering for them, as they are underrepresented in commercial porn, but also for viewers who are like me and were at any point "fed up with mainstream pornography and the way it has hijacked sexuality." (Schorn, 2012, 6) QPTV is a pay to view and download porn site, which isn't accessible to everyone, depending on economic status or even their access to the internet. However, for those with internet access, the clips, bios, and video blogs are enough to inspire and encourage those downtrodden and made invisible by the dominant porn narratives.

Now, how can we apply this queer subgenre to the concerns of contemporary anti-porn feminists? An article came out recently by an anti-porn feminist by the name of Maya Shlayen bringing up the economic privilege of those who can produce porn, and the general privilege of voyeurs who consume what I would call unethical porn. She relays the story of a retired performer named Vanessa Belmond who was abused within the industry and has become a strong anti-porn activist. Shlayen sees feminist porn as a problematic conundrum because, due to stories like Belmond's, the industry is seen as uniformly and dangerously misogynist. We must note with Shlayen that many women begin sex work because they have limited options due to their race or class (Shlayen 2013). Thus the feminist and queer performers that can afford to use pornography as an outlet for expression and a political tool cannot be compared to the performers who get on camera to make a living and may not have the opportunity to avoid strictly exploitative and harmful sets. This being said, there are two major flaws in Shlayen's views that I found. First is her rejection of all pornography while simultaneously acknowledging the potential of queer independent porn to be positive porn. She posits that, "If “feminist porn” only meant small, independent studios making queer pornography, it still wouldn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of mitigating the harms of a $100 billion a year misogynist  industry." (Shlayen 2013) I seriously disagree with her here in a way that relates to my problem with the second flaw in her work: she describes the Feminist Porn Book, written by previously discussed director Tristan Taormino, as a text that "makes clear that: 'Feminist porn is also produced within the mainstream adult industry by feminists whose work is funded and distributed by large companies such as Vivid Entertainment, Adam and Eve, and Evil Angel Productions'," adding, "so-called “feminist pornographers” partnering with the mainstream industry shows what this is all about: money. " First off, commercial pornography is in fact all about money. I am not inclined to believe that Taormino and others work through larger companies to gain profit, as it is most likely the other way around. The market for feminist porn is growing and large companies will no doubt want a hand in the financial gains. Consumers can therefor exercise power in purse/wallet by buying and viewing feminist porn over sexist titles. The permeation of feminist interests and ideals into mainstream pornography is a wonderful thing; partnered with activism that aims to reform and not demolish the industry (keeping in mind performers who enjoy and need sex work), it can do away with abusive male control of the sets and achieve safer work environments for performers.

Shlayen asks, "why do we need pornography in the first place?" Pornography is a human-made form of art, a body genre that can excite, inspire, and teach. With the right messages of inclusion, health, and consensuality, porn can have a progressive effect on culture. As a developing teen with little honest education available to me in school or at home, pornography was a vehicle for knowledge, which ended up teaching me that what I wanted for my body, as a woman, wasn't wrong. It also helped me discover that I am attracted to trans men as well as cisgender men, aiding me in building my personal definition of heterosexuality. Mainstream media, whether pornographic or not, incessantly dictates to viewers what is appropriate gender and sexual expression, under "certain sanctions and proscriptions". (Butler 525) This regulated gendering is a long-standing tradition in western civilization: early voices like 18th century British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft wrote that women are taught being an "alluring object of desire" for men is central to their worth. (Wollstonecraft 170) Women today are still encouraged to follow trends to alter and tame their bodies--as we've seen with McDougall's piece on cosmetic labiaplasty--and their desires are unrepresented and suppressed. Women are hidden from their own physical truths in order to "preserve their innocence". (Wollstonecraft 170) Commercial porn created and maintains a feedback loop between its trends and fantasies and normal society: trends are born of age-old power dynamics feeding on feminine vulnerability, porn then distributes expansions on those hierarchies, and finally receives affirmation via viewer response affected by the power of reproduced images. All feminists, sex-positive or not, can appreciate independent porn made by consenting adults, and that's what companies like Pink and White Productions and Tristan Taormino's Pucker Up productions exist to offer us. Voyeurs can easily change the industry by supporting (and importantly enjoying) positive porn that hold to the strong political tenets of queer and feminist theory. Feminist filmmaker Marielle Nitoslawska once said, in an interview regarding her 2001 documentary Bad Girl about autonomous women active in pornography: "women must begin to vocalize, to assert who they are or think they are, and to reinvent themselves in their own image. This is not something that will happen in a span of ten or twenty years." (qtd. in West & West, 2002, 13) Well, it's been over 10 years since that interview and feminist porn has already started helping queer and female-identified individuals create powerful images for themselves.

Works Cited

Attwood, Feona. (2004). PORNOGRAPHY AND  
OBJECTIFICATION: Re-reading

“the picture that divided Britain”. Feminist Media Studies. 4:1, 7-19. Retrieved from http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14680770410001674617#.UqnrHvRDvm8

Butler, Judith. (1988). Performative Acts and Gender 
Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and  
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Kolehmainen, Marjo. (2010). Normalizing and  
Gendering Affects. Feminist Media Studies.

10:2, 179-194. Published online.

Gunther, Scott. (2005). Alors, Are We 'Queer' Yet? The 
Gay & Lesbian Review/Worldwide. 12: 3.  
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McDougall, Lindy Joan. (2013). Towards a clean slit: 
how medicine and notions of normality are 
shaping female genital aesthetics. Culture, Health 
& Sexuality: An International Journal for 
Research, Intervention and Care. Published online.

Queerporn.tv. Glossary. http://queerporn.tv/wp/glossary. Accessed 12/10/13.

Queerporn.tv. Manifesto. http://queerporn.tv/wp/manifesto. Accessed 12/10/13.

Schorn, Johanna. (2012). Subverting Pornormativity:  
Feminist and Queer Interventions.

Gender Forum. 37. Retrieved from http://www.genderforum.org/issues/sexposed/subverting/

Seise, Cherie. (2010) Fucking Utopia: Queer Porn and 
Queer Liberation. Sprinkle: A

Journal of Sexual Diversity Studies. 3, 19-29. Published online.

Shlayen, Maya. (2013). Whose Porn, Whose Feminism?    Retrieved from http://www.fairobserver.com/
article/whose-porn-whose-femnism

West, D., West, J.M., & Nitoslawska, Marielle. (2002) 
Women Making Porno: Feminism's

Final Frontier? An Interview with Marielle Nitoslawska. Cinéaste. 27:3, 9-13. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/41690153

Whisnant, Rebecca. (2009) Pornography, 
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Gender and Society. Ed. Jodi O'Brien. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.. 647-51. Published online.

Williams, Linda. (1993). A Provoking Agent: The 
Pornography and Performance Art of

Annie Sprinkle. Social Text. 37, 117-133. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/466263.

Wollstonecraft, Mary. (2002). Excerpt from “A 
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Introduction to Women’s Studies: Gender in a Transnational World. I. Grewal and C. Kaplan, Eds. McGraw Hill. 170-172