The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (36 page)

Porn is labor.
This is a useful lesson of HBO’s series
Pornucopia: Going Down in the Valley
(for which I served as the academic talking head). I gave the producer Dan Chaykin a great compliment when I told him that
Pornucopia
does for the adult industry what sociologist Howard Becker’s
Artworlds
(1984) did for the world of art production by exploring the cooperative network of artists, suppliers, performers, dealers, critics, and consumers who together “produce” a work of art. I am thankful for my class’s proximity to the adult industry in the San Fernando Valley and north Hollywood and grateful for the generosity of all the people who guest lecture in my class and share both their experiences in the day-to-day operations of the industry and personal details about what it is to create a career in porn. Just a few of them include Candida Royalle, Nina Hartley, Ernest Greene, Annie Sprinkle, Susie Bright, Carol Queen, Tristan Taormino, Gino Colbert, John Stagliano, Veronica Hart, Jeannie Pepper, Eon McKai, Joanna Angel, Kimberly Kane, Dana DeArmond, Bobbi Starr, Buck Angel, Christian Mann, Steven Hirsch, Sinnamon Love, Sean Michaels, Lee Roy Myers, Sam Hain, Jacky St. James, Eddie Powell, Jessica Drake, and Graham Travis. Journalists, documentarians, academics, attorneys, and trade association and health foundation directors include Mark Kernes, Leslie Zemeckis, Fenton Bailey, Dan Chaykin, Jeff Koga, Linda Williams, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Mireille Miller-Young, Allan Gelbard, Jeffrey Douglas, Diane Duke, and Sharon Mitchell. How would it change what we think about pornography if we thought of porn folks not as seedily glamorous porn stars but working stiffs and hungry artists?

Porn is funny.
To me and to my students, a surprising feature of the films we survey, from the beginning of the twentieth century to now, is the ubiquitous use of humor, and not just any kind of humor, but bawdiness, humorously lewd and obscene language and situations. And, again
a surprise, the men rather than the women are often the butt of the joke. My essay “Crackers and Whackers: The White Trashing of Porn,” looks at porn as male popular culture to try to understand what the consumers and producers of everything from early stag films such as
Getting His Goat
(ca. 1923) and post-World War II films such as
The Dentist
(1947–1948),
Doctor Penis
(1949–1952), and
Divorce Attorney
(1996–1997), to tabloid-celebrity porn such as
John Wayne Bobbitt: Uncut
(1994), are
doing
with these films.
²⁶
Why would the men who are making these films, presumably for the pleasure of other men, mock and deride the men in the film for their hypocrisies and pretentions, both personal and professional, and their sexual and social ignorance? The close study of porn as male popular culture, a study that understands that popular culture cannot be popular unless it speaks to both the desires and anxieties of its audiences (Cultural Studies 101), reveals that porn is one of the few places in our culture where men are carrying on, humorously and farcically, a critical conversation about the foibles and failings of masculinity. That’s what I love about humanities scholarship: you don’t always discover what you set out to find, here a surprising and important lesson for feminism about how and what pornography means to men, that it is not just an exercise in patriarchal heterosexism.

Porn is sex education, whether you plan it that way or not.
When I first knew that I wanted to teach a porn class, I had to decide whether to teach it in women’s studies or film studies. I feared that if I were to teach the class in women’s studies, every student walking into the class would presume that my position would be a simply denunciatory one and that I certainly wouldn’t be showing anything “offensive.” I quickly realized that if I wanted the students to get a theoretical, historical, and institutional grasp on pornographic film
before
they began to offer their (now informed) opinions on it, I had to teach it in film studies, where the students take for granted that their course of study will necessarily entail seeing films that may be difficult, controversial, and downright offensive (if we’re doing our job right). I also knew that our sociology department has offered a renowned class on human sexuality for three decades so I didn’t feel I had to cover that territory in my class either, but could strategically focus on teaching porn as film and popular culture.

I was right not to teach it in women’s studies but wrong to think that my film studies class wouldn’t turn into a big old sex education course. Why? Partly, it’s because of the dismal state of sex education in US schools. Students have to get their sex education wherever they can. I remember sitting next to one of my students one of the first times I taught the class when we saw our first anal sex scene. She slid down in
her seat and, only half covering her eyes, whispered aloud, “I didn’t know you could do that.” With my strategy of treating my porn class just like any other genre class, I don’t give any special warnings or disclaimers: I don’t do it in my other genre class on science fiction film so I don’t do it here. But, if I feel a student is about to humiliate herself or himself, I will offer a gentle reminder that maybe we can’t always presume to know what’s good or bad for someone else, what turns others on or not. I once had a male student pronounce that an oral sex scene we had just viewed was “sexist,” because “everyone knows women hate giving head.” Several female students quickly turned around in their seats to gape at him, me too, before I gathered myself to try figure out a way to let him off the hook of his own sexual ignorance, so embarrassingly displayed. (And, thankfully, I have less and less the problem of male students saying what they think the feminist professor wants to hear, what the politically correct response would be.)

So mainstream porn provides sex education, no matter what you think of it. But another reason my class turned into a sex education class is that both the mainstream industry and the feminist and independent porn movements have taken up sex education as a social benefit, and one with a lot of market potential, especially in women-owned, community-based sex-retail businesses, described in great ethnographic detail in this volume by Lynn Comella. It is probably not surprising that several of the veteran feminist porn performers and sex workers became sexual health educators, including most notably Nina Hartley (RN), Annie Sprinkle, and Sharon Mitchell, former Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation director. (Once when Annie Sprinkle was a guest lecturer in my class she asked me what my students’ sex education experiences had been like. I said I didn’t know and so she promptly asked my students. Their responses ranged from abstinence-only programs, to fairly informative middle school classes, to “the nuns passing a fetus in a jar around the classroom.”) Susie Bright and Tristan Taormino are sex writers and journalists who became sex educators, with Taormino a good example of a newer generation of sex educator turned pornographer who sees her filmmaking as a way to address some of the interpersonal and social issues around sex, especially the place of fantasy and role-playing. I knew for sure that my class had become sex education central when the campus’s sex and relationship peer counselors asked me to regularly reserve six to eight places in my class for them. Finally, I realized that there’s such a hunger out there for a nonjudgmental place where people can talk and learn about sex. I guess my class is it.

Porn is good pedagogy.
Every one of us who teaches a class on pornography
or, more often, integrates sexually explicit material in classes on more general topics such as representation and sexuality or gender and the law, feels obliged to offer advice about how to teach it. My advice, from all of my experience, can be summed up in one maxim: never make an exception of pornography. This principle leads to pedagogical strategies that may run counter to others’ advice, especially the almost knee-jerk requirement that the instructor must issue warnings or disclaimers about the class materials and allow students to leave the class if any distress occurs, in the name of showing one’s sensitivity to the goal of providing a safe and comfortable space where a free and tolerant exchange can happen. Who doesn’t want a class where a free and tolerant exchange can take place? But is pre-framing the class as deviant and dangerous the best way to do it? Is it a good idea to
suggest
to the students in advance that they may be so traumatized by the course materials that they may have to flee at some point? Not only are the warnings disrespectful and patronizing to the students, they also offer the instructor no real cover (although it may make you feel more caring and conscientious) and, indeed, put a target on the class. Of course it helps that “porn” is in the title of my class—no one can say “I wasn’t expecting it!” I also don’t try to “protect” my students by making my classroom an inviolable space—its contours are quite fluid. Although I ask them not to invite their entire sorority, basketball team, or residence hall floor to screenings and guest lectures, they are free to bring one or two or three dorm mates, lovers, or old friends from out of town. They have even brought their parents. I also don’t try to protect them from the press. If a journalist wants to attend a class or talk to students, I ask the students what they want to do. They’ve never said “No,” and have had some interesting discussions and occasional disagreements if not altercations with them if they think they are misrepresenting the class. My students have even told me that they’re disappointed the class doesn’t get protested anymore because they felt that dealing with the protestors, writing letters to the editor, and so on was an important part of their experience of the class. (The SBCCAP folks ended up begging me to stop telling reporters that they were protesting my class because they feared being portrayed as “bigoted book burners” and losing any community support they had.)

I also don’t allow others to exceptionalize my class, especially if they are trying to “help.” In 1994, for example, we had a pornography focus group in our interdisciplinary humanities center that wanted to put on a one-day conference on pornography as part of a yearlong, statewide series of conferences on Censorship and Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation. The speakers were a stellar lineup of scholars and writers
who studied pornography from diverse disciplines, including Linda Williams, Walter Kendrick, Anne McClintock, Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Dan Linz, and Susie Bright. The humanities center director insisted that we invite Catherine MacKinnon to represent “the other side,” and I replied, “What other side, the side that doesn’t believe in interdisciplinary scholarship?” The acting dean further insisted that we put warnings on all of the publicity materials for the conference and ring the building with extra security, just in case, and to check IDs at the door to make sure no one under eighteen got in. I refused, of course, and asked them if they were planning to take the same precautions with the upcoming conference on the troubles in Northern Ireland. I have never had the least problem with my choice not to police or therapize my class, except
once
when a student brought a friend who was a little too drunkenly enthusiastic over having Nina Hartley as the guest lecturer. One of the reasons why I want to keep my class open is that it facilitates the best thing about my class: it keeps on teaching. My students tell me that the minute they leave class, they must report to their roommates, friends, parents, folks back home in Australia, what went on in class that day. They constantly have to explain the class, why it’s important to study pornography, why it’s crucial to have informed opinions. They dine out on the class for years to come: “You took that pornography class?! Tell us all about it.” It’s the class that keeps on teaching.

Notes

1
. Christopher J. Toumey,
God’s Own Scientists: Creationists in a Secular World
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994).

2
. Andrew Ross,
No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture
(New York: Routledge, 1989).

3
. Lynn Hunt, ed.,
The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800
(New York: Zone, 1993).

4
. Linda Williams,
Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible
” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2nd ed., 1999).

5
. Eric Schaeffer,
Bold! Daring! Shocking! True!: A History of Exploitation Films, 1960–1979
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1999).

6
. Jon Lewis,
Hollywood v. Hardcore: How the Struggle Over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry
(New York: NYU Press, 2000).

7
. Laura Kipnis, “(Male) Desire, (Female) Disgust: Reading Hustler,” in
Cultural Studies,
ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 383.

8
. Eithne Johnson and Eric Schaeffer, “Soft Core/Hard Gore: Snuff as a Crisis in Meaning,”
Journal of Film and Video
45, no. 2–3 (Summer–Fall 1993): 56.

9
. Johnson and Schaeffer, “Soft Core/Hard Gore,” 56.

10
. Ibid.

11
. Laura Kipnis,
Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2nd ed., 1998).

12
. Jane Juffer,
At Home with Pornography: Women, Sex, and Everyday Life
(New York: NYU Press, 1998), 2.