The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (46 page)

In 1986, during the Reagan-era alliance between right-wing Republican Attorneys General Edwin Meese and Richard Thornburg and antiporn feminists (Andrea Dworkin, among others), the company was raided, harassed, and prosecuted in a number of jurisdictions by the Justice Department. This occurred right on schedule: As the post-Civil War technological innovations in the mass medium of print had threatened reformers who pushed the Comstock Act through Congress and backlash against the movie industry reached critical mass after the coming of sound and led both conservatives and progressives to support the more stringent Revised Production Code of 1933, the boom in home video of the early-to-mid 1980s stoked fears of the pernicious effects of sexually explicit images now loosed in the unguarded American home. And as in the past, censorship was initiated by Religious Right groups’ antagonistic response to the changing status of women who were, in the words of one “pro-family” author writing on Comstock’s legacy, able to appeal to liberals and feminists by “repackag[ing] the moral values of the Seventeenth Century in the language of ‘Reform.’”
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After eight years, Adam and Eve and its attorneys won their case in court, and the company soon began producing its own line of adult videos. Adam and Eve’s most high-profile video line became a series of sexual education videos directed by and starring the hugely popular porn actress Nina Hartley. Nina grew up in the Bay Area, the half-Jewish daughter of two left-wing academics. A self-confessed bookworm, she found her teenage sexual curiosity stultified by both the puritanism of many of the adult radicals who surrounded her and the increasingly shrill pronouncements of what she saw as sex-negative radical feminists who condemned all forms of prostitution and pornography. The two books that had the most profound impact on her were
Our Bodies, Ourselves
and Xaviera Hollander’s
The Happy Hooker.
The Boston Women’s Health Collective inspired her to study nursing and commit herself to women’s empowerment in healthcare.
The Happy Hooker,
with its first person account of another academically gifted, half-Jewish, athletic blonde tomboy, whose work in the sex industry was conducted with conscientious personal and professional integrity, suggested another career path to the young nerd from Berkeley.
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Hartley told the liberal
Jewish journal
Shmate
in 1987 that Hollander’s forceful articulation of the necessary service she provided for the physical and emotional health of her clients, their relationships, and society as whole, helped her realize that work in commercial sex was possible for her. After meeting porn performer Juliet Anderson (a.k.a. “Aunt Peg”) in 1984, Nina began working in porn and became one of the industry’s most popular and prolific female stars.
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The Adam and Eve titles were originally distributed on videotape and were the approximate length of a pornographic feature film, suitable for viewing in a single sitting, and like the feature, they contain non-diegetic music that often underscores heavily edited, stylized arias of transcendent sexual bliss that reach a climax in a final production number where the tips and techniques offered by Nina in the first sections have reached an unselfconscious virtuosity.
The Advanced Guide to Oral Sex
from 1998 follows this pattern. The video begins with Nina introducing her friends, two other women, Militia and Mandy Frost, and three men, Mike Majors, Steve Hatcher, and Tony Tedeschi. Nina demonstrates gentle oral foreplay on Mike, and Militia demonstrates a more vigorous technique. Next, Tony lays plastic wrap on Mandy’s labia, and Nina explains how barrier oral sex on women is a way to play safe. Mandy and Militia demonstrate double fellatio on Tony with Nina coaching them on technique, and Nina puts on a glove to demonstrate G-spot stimulation on Militia. The final thirty minutes of the video is an orgy with all six participants, in which everything we have seen (with the exception of the plastic wrap dental dam) is integrated into the group play. The video ends with the simultaneous ejaculation of all three men onto Militia and Mandy, and Nina reminding the viewers at home to “play safe.”

Since Nina graduated with honors with a degree in nursing, it is no surprise to find her showing us around a number of highly traditional anatomical illustrations near the beginning of several of her how-to tapes. But in one of the first of her Adam and Eve videos,
Guide to Better Cunnilingus,
many viewers were introduced to a new kind of visual aid, the Wondrous Vulva Puppet, made by House O’ Chicks in San Francisco. The Vulva Puppet is a three-dimensional rendering of female genitalia whose entire purpose is to illustrate woman’s ability to give and receive pleasure. The different layers, folds, colors, and textures of the puppet moved together and enabled sex-ed teachers, discussion group leaders, and porn performers to demonstrate in amplified detail how a woman’s body can be touched by a lover. Centuries of male visualization of this zone had primarily concerned the course of the marathon swim undertaken
by spermatozoa on the way toward the ovum. The Wondrous Vulva Puppet, by contrast, was invented for women to visualize what they could feel but often were unable to see.

This emphasis on intuition was what set Nina’s videos apart from other sex instruction tapes such as the
Better Sex Series
from the Sinclair Institute, which featured the voices (and faces) of therapists, counselors, and other experts providing the final word on sexual techniques, boundaries, and propriety. Nina was constantly urging her viewers to train themselves to listen to their own bodies. Early in her
Guide to Anal Sex,
she asserts that “of all of the parts of your body, nothing knows a liar like your anus, so if your mind is saying, ‘Yes, yes!’ and your heart is saying, ‘No, no!’ your anus will always, always listen to your heart.” Later in the same video, she refers to the awareness of one’s body and the ability to communicate with a partner while engaging in anal eroticism as a language in its own right. “You don’t get ass, you earn ass. And you can’t earn ass unless you learn to speak ass.”

As popular discourses on “sex addiction” and porn’s “desensitizing” effects on “healthy” (read genitally focused, monogamous heteronormative) sexuality intensified in the late 1990s and beyond, the always outwardly gracious Nina grew even more defiant in the new sexual flavors she urged her Adam and Eve fans to try. Where the earlier videos made with producer John Gault emphasized oral sex, swinging, and female bisexuality, the later guides produced with her partner and second husband Ernest Greene came to increasingly emphasize bondage, fetishism, and domination:
Guide to Sensual Domination 1: How to Submit to a Man
and
Guide to Sensual Domination 2: How to Submit to a Woman
appeared in 2001,
Guide to Spanking
in 2004,
Guide to Erotic Bondage
in 2005,
Strap on Sex
(ending with her “pegging” receptive male anal enthusiast Christian) in 2006, and
How to Submit to a Man, How to Submit to a Woman,
and
Foot Fun
in 2007.

At the same time the Adam and Eve guides were crossing over between the self-help and couples porn video markets in the 1990s, the small press movement was beginning its third decade making the voices of minorities, feminists, queers, radicals, and sexual outlaws heard by an increasing number of readers. Cleis Press, founded in San Francisco in 1980 by Felice Newman and Frédérique Delacoste, had an immediate impact with non-academic, activist-based books on a range of women’s issues. Many of their books were controversial in the feminist community, such as their anthology
Sex Work: Writings by Women in the Sex Industry
in 1987, edited by Frédérique Delacoste and Priscilla Alexander.
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In 1997, Cleis published
The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women
by Tristan Taormino, and the book became one of the all-time, best-selling, sexual self-help books.

In addition to the background set of small press books on sex and feminism, Taormino’s video adaptation of
The Ultimate Guide,
released by John “Buttman” Stagliano’s Evil Angel Video, and her later work with Vivid-Ed take place in the wake of several changes in commercial pornographic video since Hartley had begun her work with Adam and Eve in 1994.
The Ultimate Guide
video appeared as the more heavily compressed medium of DVD was rapidly replacing videotape, and the later Vivid-Ed guides came out after online video-on-demand downloading made the individual scene, rather than the complete title, the basic unit of exchange. Each of these developments made both titles and individual scenes much longer, and now the scene became the arena in which a highly formalized and stylized range of positions and acts were staged to provide what Linda Williams calls “diff’rent strokes” likely to turn on the “diff’rent folks” in front of the screen.
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As some sex scenes in conventional porn stretched out to thirty-five or forty minutes with no musical accompaniment, the palpable artificiality of the markers of passion became painfully obvious, with female performers grunting or moaning for minutes at a time with the droning attenuated monotony of a La Monte Young musical composition.

Taormino and her co-directors Stagliano and Ernest Greene avoided the didactic boredom of the educational film and the generic boredom of much commercial porn by using a narrative arc which turned the sex-pert Taormino into a compelling dramatic character whose often comic presence in the film was the farthest imaginable from the detached voice of medical or institutional authority. Thus, like
Street Corner, The Ultimate Guide
“is fiction, and yet it is not fiction.” The film portrays Taormino’s dramatized efforts to convince John “Buttman” Stagliano to bring
The Ultimate Guide
to video with Tristan herself directing and opens with her pitching the project in his office, radiating enthusiasm as the perpetually harried and bewildered Buttman worries about his business and her lack of experience.

The irrepressible Tristan says, “I know that I can do it. It’s not going to be like those boring how-to instructional videos that are on the market now . . . I want to do it in traditional Buttman style. I want it to be gonzo, I want it to be real, I want it to be spontaneous, I want it to be hot, really hot so that women will run out and want to have anal sex!”

The movie’s fascinating central conceit is that Tristan’s courage in her initial journey as film director will mirror the intended audience’s courage in initially exploring anal sex. Her audition for the role of director
consists of showing Buttman that she can help butt-shy porn performer Ruby take a hand in her ass, which she does with the help of a valise full of toys. Secure in her mission, she assembles a group of performers at Stagliano’s house and replicates one of her seminars, which now entails a discussion with the male and female performers about their anxieties, experiences, and pleasures surrounding anal sex. She quickly discards her medical diagrams and uses the live bottom of none other than Nina Hartley to demonstrate anal foreplay. The middle section of the film intercuts discussions from the seminar with anal sex scenes featuring the performers illustrating the topics of the discussion. Throughout the film, Stagliano, Greene, and others remind us that “Tristan doesn’t do sex,” but during a final group photo shoot ostensibly for the video’s box cover, Tristan is seduced by the half dozen porn professionals as Nina intones, “Madame Teacher, I think the tables have turned.” As in the Nina Hartley videos, the final orgy illustrates many of the techniques demonstrated throughout the movie, and tribute is paid to porn convention when the three male performers ejaculate on Tristan’s body. Then, in a candid demonstration of safer sex that is truly singular in the world of commercial heterosexual pornography, she smiles up into Buttman’s camera and invites the HIV-positive Stagliano to put on a glove and put his fingers into her ass. Viewers who might be reticent to explore the topic of the movie can thus take courage from Tristan’s own journey from the nervous, eager-to-please figure from the opening scenes to the blissed out (but still safe-sex-aware) sexual subject of the film’s conclusion.

Taormino was later instrumental in convincing Vivid Video’s Steve Hirsch to begin a new line of educational videos under the Vivid-Ed banner, and several of her early Vivid-Ed
Expert Guides
replicated the seminar structure of her workshops and showed her speaking to a diverse group of men and women onscreen before live models demonstrated sexual techniques in front of the group, but the onscreen audience only asked questions and provided reaction shots. Later releases drew upon the discussion scenes from Evil Angel’s
Ultimate Guide
and her unscripted documentary-style pornos
House of Ass
(Adam and Eve, 2005) and the
Chemistry
series (Vivid, 2006 ff.) in having the performers share their experiences and preferences in interviews, which are then demonstrated in extended sex scenes with partners of their choice. Here is
Our Bodies, Ourselves
in X-rated action: Sexual performers are co-creators of the educational material, and the filmmakers emphasize the great diversity of the performers’ desires, experiences, and responses. The sex scenes play out according to these desires and responses with no imperative to run through the range of “diff’rent strokes.” Taormino’s
control is largely exercised in pre-production, where she matches up performers using a complex series of spreadsheets that she has hinted in interviews are as intricate and incomprehensible to outsiders as an NFL playbook.

The Expert Guide to Female Orgasms
from 2010 begins with Taormino seated on a sofa addressing the camera. A range of sex toys is on the coffee table in front of her, making her look like the Avon Lady of vibrators. After she introduces the topic, we see a montage of all of the female performers in the video talking about their unique, diverse, and in many ways incomparable experiences of orgasm, often using gestures and facial expressions to demonstrate the invisible feelings and physical sensations the camera can never hope to capture.