The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (7 page)

These filmmakers used a pseudonym, Veronika Rocket. They’d broken so many rules, their genderfuck was so effortless, with such beauty, that I used their film as a benchmark for the rest of my erotic criticism career. I made a pilgrimage to Philadelphia to meet them and visit their original sets. Ruben Masters opened the door of her carriage house, looking like Louise Brooks in
Pandora’s Box
and checked me up and down. “Vodka stinger?” she said.

I had so many lucky breaks like that.

Meanwhile, I introduced myself to the baker’s dozen of blue film companies in Southern California and New York. I went to the annual trade conference in Vegas, which at the time was a tucked-away ghetto at the Consumer Electronics Convention, far from all the new TVs and stereos. I hung out in the ladies’ bathroom at the Sahara Hotel with copies of
On Our Backs
to initiate conversations with the “X” actresses who weren’t accustomed to anyone giving a damn about their real stories.

There were lots of men to talk to, of course. Most of the older ones were very conservative. A handful of men ran this business for years, a gin rummy game consortium, and they were as bigoted as Archie Bunker. They had a hard time believing I was there for real, not a joke, not a straight girl on a slumming lark.

My
Penthouse
column—and the video library I created at my old sex-toy
shop—sold so many videos that they had to endure me. They were jaded, and yet naïve about how much their world was changing.

They’d say the most incredible things on the record: “Women don’t like to see anal sex; that’s nasty. Any white actress who lets a black actor fuck her on screen is out of her mind; her career is through. How can a lesbian get pregnant; that’s impossible! Don’t you have a husband somewhere to look after?”

Some of their sons and daughters were more open, or openly rebelling. Punk rock, queer lib, and feminist sensibilities were hitting the artistic side of the “adult” industry. It was contagious.

It used to be a pop-and-son business tradition, almost quaint that way. One of the twenty-something heirs to the gin rummy game sat down with me one day and explained how Ruben Sturman, the granddaddy of the peepshow and the adult rain-coater industry, evaded the IRS for so long. How did he manage to never pay taxes? How did he run a business completely outside of the US establishment? Our conversation took place three years before Sturman finally got busted for good. My friend told me in detail how the money was generated, methodically picked up in bags, and moved from place to place.

“Why are you telling me this?” I asked him.

“Because you make lesbian fist-fucking videos,” he said.

I didn’t realize how daring that act was until he said it. I had no idea that this was the key to mutual confidence—risk.

The lesbian feminist erotic world we’d created at
On Our Backs
was our own little cloister. We were innocent of what “was” and “wasn’t” outside the law. If we had two lovers crazy about each other who wanted to be videotaped, we didn’t tell them what to do. If they put their hands inside each other at the moment of orgasm, to our eyes, it was terribly romantic.

To the US Justice Department, it was just about the most obscene act ever. Go figure.

Everything women
actually
did to get off seemed to be against the blue laws, we found out. Women’s orgasms, real orgasms, real female bodily fluids, were a no-no every time we tried to sell our magazine or videos in conservative states.

Places like Oklahoma and Florida said that G-spot ejaculations were illegal “water sports,” “golden showers,” and therefore on their list of community obscenities that violated the Miller standard. They didn’t know anything about female anatomy or physiology—and they didn’t care. You can see those same ideas today, in places like Alabama that
make possession of vibrators a crime. The old-school porn dudes called them “soft states”; I called them “women-don’t-cum” states.

On Our Backs,
and our video arm, Fatale Video, were rudely introduced to the world of “legal obscenity” where nothing has anything to do with reality. Strangely, our unintended risk taking gave us the cred to be allowed into discussions in the hardcore boys’ room. They never would have talked to me otherwise.

Video changed everything—in porn first, then in Hollywood. The days of the peep shows and the theaters were numbered, although it’s interesting to see the peep show has outlasted the elegant theater. People still like to feed those coins in close quarters, the special claustrophobia of tight circumstances.

More importantly, video offered a way in for artists, entrepreneurs, and sex radicals—who, for better or worse, never would’ve made a movie before. A new, small set of geniuses were born, along with a much vaster set of mediocrities. Not different from film, just multiplied, like rabbits.

When I first heard from my readers at
Penthouse Forum,
who wrote me by hand (pre-email!), I realized two things. One, the overwhelming majority of women had never seen an erotic motion picture before.
At all.
Their furtive glances of still photos in men’s magazines were mostly female nudes. Maybe Burt Reynolds in his famous
Cosmo
spread.

But what about men? It wasn’t much more sophisticated. Very few men had seen more than a tiny sampling of erotic films. Ask a random man if he can name five or six full-length erotic movies he’s seen. If he is able to make such a list, he’s part of an exclusive club.

Watching erotic films—movies that are driven forward by sex scenes—is different from looking at single photos, pictorials, snippets, clips. The medium, the experience of going all the way through an eighty-minute feature, is an entirely different ride than a momentary glimpse, a fast-forward.

To prove it, I started throwing living room movie shows for my friends. I would give away my screener copies and show segments of my favorites. It was like I was offering free rocket tickets to the moon. My neighborhood audience was fascinated—and completely inexperienced.

The living room got a little bigger—I created an educational show-and-tell clips lecture called “How to Read a Dirty Movie,” and another one called “All Girl Action: The History of Lesbian Erotic Cinema,” which I started premiering at independent theaters like the Castro and the Roxie. I hit the festival circuit all over the world, including a daring mission by the British Film Institute to get my movies in, despite ironclad UK customs rules against them.

One college-tour memory stands out. In rural Blacksburg, Virginia, a closeted gay student got ahold of student union funds for Friday Night Fun! at Virginia Tech to bring me out there for one of my clips shows. This is a school with a history of devotion to Southern white boys and military service. The students weren’t even allowed to watch R-rated films on campus.

I didn’t find out this history until I was moments away from the podium. My young sponsor looked like he’d just detonated a bomb and his face was covered in sweat. “My Dirty Movie” clips show started, which happens to begin with excerpts of two young handsome army cadets making out on a firing range. I thought the roof was going to cave in. Blacksburg boys were running for the doors, making vomiting sounds, screaming.

The students who stayed in their seats watched a full spectrum of sexual and human emotion, delivered by porn’s finest auteurs. They got more sex education in one hundred minutes than they’d had in their entire lives.

The stunned president of the Young Republicans, a co-sponsor of Friday Night Fun!, took me out to a fast food dinner afterward. He told me that he found it curious that the scenes of
lesbians
making love had pleased him, while the scenes of gay men had given him a stomachache. I was impressed that he was calm enough to observe his own reactions.

“I don’t disagree with all of what you do,” he said, “but I think it’s entirely unjust that you receive checks from the government for your homosexuality.”

I stared at him with my mouth full of fries. “Oh, it’s not that bad,” I said, “I only get half as much because I’m bisexual.”

The success of the clips shows, despite Blacksburg, led me further into the university world. I started a class called The Politics of Sexual Representation at the University of California, Santa Cruz; it was a rewarding teaching experience. The students were prepared to look at material that was considered ephemeral or taboo, and decode it.

In film circles, in the Ivy League schools, among artists, and art historians, this thing called “porn” became a sophisticated interest, with many reporters and scholars following the same leads that had inspired me so long ago. The public developed a sense of normality and better still,
humor
about porn, which had been missing when I began my “Erotic Screen” column.

Much like the topic of gay life, the “porn debate” seems to exist in two parallel worlds. On one side, it’s old hat, a yawn. In the other world, Planet Prude, the legal and public policy climate is fundamentalist. Politicians
and religious leaders employ sex as their bogeyman more vociferously than ever, enlisting liberal as well as conservative support.

The twenty-first century Gilded Age is one of moralism and slut shaming for the general public—while corruption and Caligula-like license is the rule for the elite. My entrée into the “golden age” of porn looks so utopian now! The 1970s and 1980s were a heyday for women’s progress in journalism, for coming out of the closet, for breaking down once impermeable barriers in both the media and sex-film trade. I was dubbed the “Pauline Kael of Porn” in 1986 by the
San Francisco Chronicle,
but within a few years there would come to be dozens of reporters and critics covering the erotic film industry and its offerings. It was truly our “Porno Spring!” The art and academic establishment confronted erotic desire; what was once ephemeral drew potent scholarly attention. Among the cognoscenti, blue movies became historic. I was voted into the Fourth Estate Hall of Fame of the X-Rated Critics Organization in 2002.

I was lucky to wander in, like Alice in Wonderland finding the cake with “Eat Me” on it. I’m very glad I did. Unlike Alice, I never went back to being small.

Emotional Truths and Thrilling Slide Shows: The Resurgence of Antiporn Feminism

CLARISSA SMITH and FEONA ATTWOOD

Clarissa Smith
is reader in sexual cultures at the University of Sunderland, UK. Her research has focused on the texts and contexts of sexually explicit media, and sexual practices. She is a founding member of the Onscenity Network, and involved in various initiatives focused on young people and sexual health. Her specific areas of research include audience use and understandings of pornography, the production and consumption of “amateur” and more mainstream pornographies, aesthetics, and the legislative environments in which these occur. Smith is the author of
One for the Girls!: The Pleasures and Practices of Reading Women’s Porn,
which offers a uniquely multidisciplinary approach, focusing on text, production and consumption, testing many of the “common sense” and cherished claims about the role of pornography in society. Along with Feona Attwood and Martin Barker, she is currently undertaking the analysis of results obtained through the Porn Research questionnaire,
pornresearch.org
.

Feona Attwood
is a professor at Middlesex University, UK. She is the editor of
Mainstreaming Sex: The Sexualization of Western Culture
and
Porn.com
: Making Sense of Online Pornography,
and the co-editor of the following special journal issues: Controversial Images (with Sharon Lockyer,
Popular Communication);
Researching and Teaching Sexually Explicit Media (with I.Q. Hunter,
Sexualities);
and Investigating Young People’s Sexual Cultures (with Clarissa Smith,
Sex Education
).

A
t an antipornography conference at Wheelock College in Boston in 2007, Gail Dines described the gathering as “the resurgence of a new national movement to liberate women from misogyny and oppression,” and the moment for the launching of a new organization, Stop Porn Culture.
¹
The notion of a “porn culture” has become an important rubric for the range of campaigns and writings that have sprung up in the first decade of the 2000s. These include the evangelical crusades of
XXXchurch.com
, whose slogan is “Jesus Loves Porn Stars,” and Michael Leahy’s Porn Nation tours that focus on porn addiction, both launched in 2002; the launch of the UK group Object that campaigns against “sex object culture” in 2003;
²
popular books by journalists such as
Pornified
by Pamela Paul and
Female Chauvinist Pigs
by Ariel Levy, both in 2005; and a range of policy reports, beginning with the Australian discussion paper, “Corporate Paedophilia,” by Emma Rush and Andrea La Nauze in 2006. These declamations of concern over the rise of a “porn culture” join numerous confessional narratives by reformed or rescued insiders, such as Shelley Lubben’s account of life in the porn industry, which purports to offer the “truth behind the fantasy” of a trade in flesh.
³
All of these accounts present their interventions as driven by alarm at the spectacular new visibility of pornography made possible first by video and reaching its apotheosis through the Internet and other mobile technologies.