The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (24 page)

In this interview, I respond directly to the common critiques of porn by acknowledging that porn can oppress and objectify women, even if it
does not always have that objective or result in that experience for the performer. These internalized critiques, and my anticipation of them, has influenced how I understand myself as a sex worker in the world. While I know that I feel good about what I am doing and do not experience coercion in my sex work, it can be difficult to communicate that to others. It can also be difficult to express my personal belief that a woman has the right to engage in consensual objectifying activities without shame. Looking back on interviews I gave in the past, I see how my responses have evolved. I became more aware of what kind of career I was crafting for myself in the porn industry, and I became more comfortable with articulating that to people. My initial ideals about my role in porn slowly transformed into what I
actually
did in porn. Porn has been a positive choice for me. It is no longer something I think
will
be good for me, it is something I can say
has been
empowering and strengthening rather than oppressive and denigrating.

I did not fully identify as a feminist until the spring of 2009. As I sat in my seat at the Feminist Porn Awards in Toronto, I felt ecstatic. I was surrounded by friends and loved ones, people in the industry whom I had worked with, people I respected deeply. I watched as my favorite producers, directors, and performers were honored with awards. I was so proud of each of them, especially Shine Louise Houston, the person who gave me my start in the industry. While I saw each of them as feminist pornographers, I had yet to place myself in the same category. I saw that what we had in common was our desire to make pornography that broke boundaries of tradition and showed authentic, empowered sex. I thought we had many things in common but I didn’t think that all our commonalities existed under the heading of feminist. And then my name was called from the stage. In a highly surreal moment, I staggered on stage to receive my award for Heartthrob of the Year. It was at some point in those next few moments, on stage in front of hundreds that I came to see myself as so many others had already: I performed in feminist porn, I was a feminist porn performer. I was a feminist. In all those years of crafting my work to represent empowerment, awareness, positive female sexuality, women’s choice, I was representing feminist ideals about sex. After years of believing that all or most feminists disapproved of what I was doing with my life, it took a moment on a stage beneath a bright spotlight to realize that many feminists not only approved of, but appreciated, what I was doing. It was also the moment I realized I had been setting myself up, through all my choices, to be seen that way—as a feminist porn performer.

Notes

1
. Marilyn Corsianos, “Mainstream Pornography and ‘Women’: Questioning Sexual Agency,”
Critical Sociology
33 (September 2007): 865.

2
. Dawn H. Currie, “Decoding Femininity: Advertisements and Their Teenage Readers,”
Gender and Society
11, no. 4 (1997): 453–77; Petra M. Boynton, “‘Is That Supposed to be Sexy?’ Women Discuss Women in Top Shelf Magazines,”
Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology
9 (1999): 91–105.

3
. Virginie Despentes,
King Kong Theory
(New York: Feminist Press, 2010).

Queer Feminist Pigs: A Spectator’s Manifesta

JANE WARD

Jane Ward
is associate professor of women’s studies at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of
Respectably Queer,
as well as several articles on queer politics, transgender relationships, heteroflexibility, the failure of diversity programs, and, most recently, queer motherhood. She teaches courses in feminist and queer studies, and is also an amateur parent, an angry low-femme, and a baker of pies.

G
iven that I am a feminist dyke and a professor of women’s studies, I recognize that it is a bit of a cliché to say that I am ambivalent about porn. Academics are arguably ambivalent about everything, and most feminists are keenly aware of the gendered and racialized forms of violence and exploitation that undergird much of the adult film industry, even as they oppose censorship, support sex workers’ rights, and enjoy the porn they enjoy. Most queer feminists I know, myself included, also make sexual self-determination and the pursuit of our own orgasms the highest goal when it comes to engaging porn. Lucky are those whose arousal results from homegrown and independently produced feminist porn cast with gender-variant people of various races, body sizes, and abilities. But for some of us, mainstream porn—for all of its sexist and racist tropes and questionable labor practices—still casts its spell.

What does it mean to have a queer feminist relationship to porn? Most efforts to answer this question presume that the answer lies in the means of production (Are films produced by and for women or queers? How are performers treated and compensated? Are all sex acts safe and consensual?) or in the visual content of adult films themselves (Are we viewing genuine orgasms? What kind of bodies, desires, and subjectivities appear? Is the film directed and shot in a way that invites a queer and/or feminist gaze?).

Consider, for instance, this excerpt from one queer kid’s inspiring ode to queer porn, which has gone viral on the (queer) Internet and takes the form of a cover of Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way”:

Porn This Way Lyrics
¹

It doesn’t matter if you love hir, or capital H-I-R

Just turn that volume up and watch queer porn, baby.

Society told me when I was young

about various normative sexual scripts

I rolled my hair and put my lipstick on

And then tore those scripts to bits

There’s nothing wrong with wanting what you want

You know desire is a social construct

So when the lights are on, the cameras rolling

That’s when we all start getting fucked

It’s beautiful when you say, “Can I touch you there?” “Yes you may!”

We’re on the right track to make some hot queer porn today

Don’t eroticize bodies of color

Respectfully eroticize one another

We’re on the right track to make some hot queer porn today

Oh there are so many ways to make queer porn worthy of praise

Let’s make some hot queer porn today

You’re not an object—you are the subject

You’re not an object—you are the subject

You’re not an object—you are the subject

You are!

Let every lick melt heteropatriarchy

Every bite—right into white supremacy

Porn that humanizes is so hot, you’ll want that shit on DVD

Having the sex you want is not a sin

Believe capital H-I-R

Your body is your own so you can say

What really, really turns you on . . .

I like porn this way! Queer porn this way! We’re on the right track now

let’s queer porn today!

This creative reworking of Gaga’s song exemplifies some of the persistent tensions and challenges involved in efforts to “queer porn today.” On the one hand, there’s nothing wrong with wanting what you want because desire is socially constructed (queer principle number one). This principle has arguably resulted in the dominance of a kind of queer laissez-faire position on porn; no card carrying queer radical is going to tell anyone what should or shouldn’t get her off. And yet, on the other hand, we recognize that not all porn is created equal, and the differences
matter.
We must, for feminist reasons if not for queer ones, distinguish between the impact of films that capitalize on heteronormative rape culture (that is, films marketed to older straight men who fantasize about raping teen girls), for instance, and those marketed to dykes who want to watch bald girls fucking in their San Francisco crash pad. Indeed, the porn most worthy of queer praise is respectful and humanizing, though perhaps not in wholly predictable ways. It eroticizes bodies of color, but not in a problematically fetishistic way. It melts heteropatriarchy. It takes a bite out of white supremacy. It is subjectifying, it believes in the revolutionary power of genderqueerness, and it prays at the altar of capital H-I-R. Taken together, these aims arguably constitute queer/feminist/antiracist principle number two.

Agreed. I am on board with this vision. To the extent that such porn exists, it
is
the porn worthy of our praise. But here’s the rub: for many queers, it isn’t the porn that gets us off.

Queer viewers have long found queer meaning and taken queer pleasure in mainstream media. Perhaps no one has more developed skills in this arena than slash writers, for instance, who take media not intended to have queer meaning and rewrite or reanimate it with queer themes and images. But many of us are far too lazy for this level of interactivity with media, and explicit porn—already so packed with sex acts and so thin on character development—doesn’t easily lend itself to this kind of queer reinscription.

And herein lies my ambivalence. We need a clearer set of guidelines about
queer pornographic spectatorship,
or a means of “queering” porn that doesn’t rely on filmmakers to deliver to us imagery already stamped with the queer seal of approval, and that doesn’t automatically equate queer viewers with queer viewing. Does it matter
how
we view? How, precisely, do we watch mainstream porn
queerly
(other than simply being queer ourselves, or having queer sex during or after our viewing)? Can we watch sexist porn and still have feminist orgasms? In sum, does it matter how we relate to our less-than-praise-worthy desires, or does the “anything that gets you off” principle ultimately trump everything else?

Feminist Subjects, Queer Pigs: My Argument with Ariel Levy

In the acclaimed book
Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture,
lesbian feminist writer Ariel Levy persuasively warns against the increasing commodification of women’s sexuality, citing everything from women’s leadership in the sex industry (think Christie Hefner, the CEO of
Playboy)
to the porn-star aspirations of middle-school girls to the astronomical rise in breast enlargement surgeries and striptease aerobics to the emergence of sex-crazy queer bois. What Levy finds especially troubling about the “raunch culture” of today is that young women not only enthusiastically participate in and promote it, but also seem to equate it with feminist liberation. According to Levy, the corporate media—from fashion magazines to television shows like
Sex and the City
—have duped young women into believing that feminism is passé and that sexual expression is now their most important contribution, their most exciting frontier.

In my women’s studies classes, Levy’s book has been an undeniably powerful teaching tool. Because most of my students are new to feminism, I spend several weeks simply drawing their attention to the ways that representations of girls and women almost always foreground feminine appearance and heterosexual desirability over all else. The examples in Levy’s book are invaluable in this regard. And yet, her argument rests on a premise that I cannot get behind, namely that the vast majority of girls and women are suffering from false consciousness; they are victimized by a corporate media catering to men, and alienated from their authentic sexual desires. If this is true, so many questions remain, not the least of which is whether any sexuality can be truly “authentic,” or uninfluenced by our cultural context. Given my uneasiness about Levy’s logic, I was delighted when, in 2006, I found out that she would be speaking in Los Angeles about her book. She was guest lecturing in a queer studies class at the University of Southern California, and before I had a chance to ask any questions, other members of the audience offered up queer criticisms of the feminist authenticity imperative in Levy’s analysis. Is there such a thing as sexuality unmediated by culture? And if so, who decides the content of this authentic, feminist sexuality? Lastly, how could Levy be so certain that raunch culture wasn’t an expression of many women’s genuine desires?

Levy responded by saying that while of course she didn’t know anything about the sexual desires of individual women, she simply could not accept that so many women and girls naturally have the exact same raunchy desires as everyone else (the desire to emulate Paris Hilton, or
to drunkenly flash their boobs on camera and so forth). This was an interesting point, except that Levy didn’t seem to be arguing for sexual
diversity
as much as for a mass movement toward feminist sexuality, a feminist sexuality she was unwilling to define. At this point, I asked her pointedly, “what
do
you want women to find sexy?” She laughed and responded that it wasn’t for her to say. “But isn’t this what’s at stake here?” I asked. And then, frustrated with this level of abstraction, I couldn’t help myself. I said: “Look, I
do
wish that I found lesbian feminist imagery more appealing, but often what I want to watch is raunchy porn. I feel very capable, though, of disidentifying with it. It does not determine my politics, or other things about my life. Still, are you suggesting that my sexuality is less feminist, or more damaged, than it should or could be?” Levy replied in a somewhat defensive tone, “I don’t know. I’m not your therapist. You’d need to look into that yourself.”