Quick Review: Daddy, a Memoir from Madison Young

I feel oddly mixed about Madison Young's memoir, Daddy. It starts off strong with insights into Young's art, work and relationships with family, other artists and her partners--and she really bares her soul, which almost always makes an interesting memoir. Very intimate details about her relationships are given, with some thought, but something about the style of writing left me wanting a good deal of the time. The book begins and ends with much self-examination, and these are the parts I liked the best. Yet the bulk of the book is a series of loosely related life events, which is kind of how we all live our lives, but that choice didn't give me the meaty, explicit connections that I like in memoirs.

On the other hand, it is this style that lends the books some of its strength--when we look back at our lives, we can try to force a simple, coherent narrative, but that's always a bit contrived. Young leaves her life messy in this memoir, and that's to be commended, even if as a reader it sometimes wasn't as satisfying.

I suspect that future memoirs, if she continues writing them, will be better than this one as she hones her writing craft--a book centering on the founding of Femina Potens would be most welcome, for instance, as the bits and pieces we get about it skim the surface. I want to hear (even) more about how feminism, art, submission and motherhood have intersected (or not!) in her life. There is a conceit here that the book is about Young's Daddy, yet is also about her, and that works for what this book is. But I also would love to hear more about her feminism, art and porn work apart from her partner's place in her life, though it's possible that separating her partner from all of that isn't possible(?).

Links:
The book's site: http://daddythememoir.wordpress.com/

Listening to Lorelei Lee

"I didn’t choose this profession as a political act. You will not hear me say that I decided to get naked because I believed it would be sexually liberating or empowering. I’m not going to tell you that when I took off my clothes in front of the camera for the first time, I immediately knew I was on a path to self-discovery. The journey of the last ten years was not something I planned, and the truth of my experience is much more complicated than the public discourse on pornography and sex—shouted out in large, bright headlines from magazine and newspapers—would have you believe. What I can tell you is that as I continued to do this work—as I came up against my own ideas about femininity, power, and sex—I found strength in the part of my identity that developed out of my experiences as a sex worker. I found a manifesto of my own ethics, and I found that, to my surprise, I believe deeply in the positive power of sexually explicit imagery.

I am a feminist, and I am a pornographer. I have been paid for sexual performances of every kind. After a lot of reckoning, I’ve come to believe that the work I continue to do makes the world a better place for women to live in."--Lorelei Lee, The Feminist Porn Book

I can't see how any anti-porn feminist could read that and reject Lee's experience as genuine. Also don't know how you could read that and not want to read the rest of her piece in The Feminist Porn Book. 

Listening to Dylan Ryan: Authenticity in Feminist Porn

Still (slowly!) working my way through The Feminist Porn Book.  Every piece in it has so much going on, I sometimes feel like "summing up" articles here just isn't doing it justice--but I'll live in hope that readers will be tantalized by little tidbits here to read the book for themselves.  Dylan Ryan's piece, Fucking Feminism, is a dense analysis of feminist porn artfully disguised as a lovely memoir piece.  It's downright tricky, this piece, because you're reading along about Ryan's entry into the world of feminist porn, and before you know it, you've read something that takes on many of the main themes of discussing feminist porn, addressing all sorts of anti-porn critiques without vilifying said critiques, or dismissing them outright; Ryan manages to give room for a lot of the complexities of these debates that are often left to the side.  At the same time, she's kind of "just" talking about how she came to be in porn.  And she does all of this in just a few pages.  It's a great stylistic choice, because the more varied stories are told about (feminist and not-so-feminist) porn, the better.

A central theme of Ryan's take on queer and feminist porn is that of "authenticity", which she acknowledges to be a complex concept.  Noting early on in her life as a porn consumer that the sex in much of porn wasn't the kind of sex she was having, or liked to have, and that the bodies (especially female bodies) in porn weren't like hers in various ways, she knew that she could make better porn.  One way to make better (and, as it turns out, more feminist) porn was to better represent sex and the bodies of performers more authentically:

The films Nina [Hartley], Annie [Sprinkle], and others made represented a sexuality that was open, honest, and without shame; they showcased sex that was fun and consensual. They had a sexual agency that I found arousing. It was the first time that I saw sex that resonated with me and that I wanted to emulate...[e]ven with these films though, I still had issues with the bodies: the differences between theirs and mine. I couldn’t relate to the curvaceous body type of Nina Hartley or Annie Sprinkle. At five-feet-ten and 145 pounds, I have been athletic and sinewy for most of my adult life. My breasts are small A cups, and my look is often more androgynous than girly. Like many women, I experienced the simultaneous intrigue and revulsion that can accompany pornographic film watching: of being simultaneously captivated and repulsed by the performers as they embody stereotypical female “beauty” and “perfection.”

 I suspect that many men also feel a similar "simultaneous intrigue and revulsion", at least at times, though of course men have a different relationship to women's bodies, and to their own bodies, than women do.  Still, it's great that Ryan gives voice to this idea. 

Ryan got a chance fairly early on to do some practical tests of her ideas, when Shine Louise Houston asked Ryan to be in what was to be their first porn film.  The film also starred Jiz Lee(!), whose piece in The Feminist Porn book I talked about here.  (The way these folks met and got together to make feminist porn, by the way, is part of the "context" of feminist porn that Lynn Comella wrote about in her piece in the same book.)  As she has continued to make movies, she has continued to consciously use authenticity as a touchstone, which is part of what makes her work, she tells us, subversive of the traditional paradigm.  She says:

When Shine and I first talked, we both believed that the majority of mainstream porn was inauthentic and not in agreement with what we knew to be true of our sexualities and the sexualities of those around us. “Authenticity” took on a somewhat mythological quality and became the Holy Grail in our vision for pornographic filmmaking: if we could achieve it, we truly would have transcended the existing constraints of the known porn world. We considered authentic porn our goal. Even now, this far into my porn career, I still reference the concept of authenticity as a sizeable part of my rationale for the porn that I make. It is a term that I use frequently to explain my position and identity as a porn performer. By situating myself inside my understanding of authenticity and explaining that to interviewers and interrogators, I also protect myself from some of the criticism that dogs other porn performers. Of course, what is “authentic” varies among individuals. When I say I’m making authentic porn, it means I prioritize my sexuality, which has allowed me a much less-criticized position than a female performer who may not have thought as much about authenticity in sexual representation.

In true feminist spirit, Ryan also talks about the limits of her ability to transform porn as a cisgendered, white woman:  

I struggle to blaze a trail for women while accepting my own whiteness and privilege. I “get” to be in porn, to raise my conceptual fist to the mainstream because I am close enough to the mainstream to even be let inside in the first place. This has been a bitter pill to swallow, but it reminds me that the deeper work of change to the representation of women in porn has to occur beyond me. It will come when we have greater inclusion of women of all body types, ages, and ethnicities in porn to counter the dominant imagery.

See! Told you she is taking on all kinds of various complexities!

She even manages to quickly sum up her shift from 'I'm not a feminist, but...' kind of thinking to identifying as a feminist, and as a feminist porn performer:

 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.

Ryan is the kind of writer who has clearly thought things out so precisely that I had to resist just quoting the whole text--as it is, I kind of failed, as you see from the swathes of quotes above. I recommend reading the entire article:  The details of Ryan's entry into porn and the way she navigates these complex conceptual puzzles is half of the joy of the article. The other half being reading what is essentially deep feminist theory that reads like a memoir.


Ryan has several interviews which convey some of the themes of her piece in The Feminist Porn Book:
Here's one on HuffPo. 

One from backstage at the Feminist Porn Conference (I think):


And another:


Note: This is one of a series of posts about articles in The Feminist Porn Book. The other posts can be found here.

Listening to Jiz Lee

I’m wearing a bright pastel blue suit I hand-dyed myself to match the suit worn by David Bowie in his music video for “Life on Mars.” I’m a dapper version of Bowie, standing for photos with a golden glammed-up Adrianna Nicole in one of the biggest and most outlandishly decorated homes I’ve ever seen. Adrianna has handpicked her co-stars, creating scenes from her personal fantasies. She reclines on a white chaise lounge, gold lamé legs wrapped around me, wide eyes hungry. My large, flesh-colored strap-on cock juts out from the fly of my David Bowie blue pants and my hand pushes forcefully into her mouth. It all feels so good. Warm, wet, incredibly intimate. My fingers probe her wide mouth. I could do this for hours.--Jiz Lee, The Feminist Porn Book

Reading the opening of Jiz Lee's article in The Feminist Porn Book makes me wonder:  How is it that anti-porn feminists can so easily disregard the experiences of a person like Lee, who has consciously taken on porn as part of their exploration of self, utilizing their body as a "canvas for art"?  Sure, Lee's experiences in porn (and in life!) may not be run-of-the-mill, but they are the result of conscious choices that have led to, according to Lee themself, a set of positive growth experiences, along with being part of simply making art. 

I often hear anti-porn feminists declaring that positive experiences by performers in porn are not only few-and-far between, but irrelevant--it's the general masses of porn performers who are being harmed, they say, and happy, successful porn performers are the exception that proves the rule. I know there are issues, serious issues, with sex work in porn--similarly there are serious issues with work in nursing, in sweatshops, in teaching. I also understand that sex work is different (for some!) than other kinds of work, in important ways. But I would rather listen to the sex workers themselves.  I'd rather listen to them tell me how it can be different, how the negatives and positives of porn play out for them, than assume that I know, or should judge whether folks should do porn for work. 

Consent is sometimes complex (can women who have a dearth of options for employment be consenting to do porn in the same way that men, who have more options, consent?), but Lee's experiences opens our eyes to the cases where the consent is not only fairly obvious, but fundamental to what they are doing--specifically, in queer porn. Lee says: 

For example, the decision to shave my legs for queer films, like Superfreak, was my own. The key is that it is a choice, not an ultimatum...[c]hoice, or performers’ sexual agency, is one of the main differences between queer porn and mainstream genres...[I]f there’s one thing that makes queer porn different, it’s respecting a performers’ choice—the choice to safely fuck how they want and to look how they believe is sexy.

Lee's article is a perfect example of what listening to folks who do porn can do to one's ideas about working porn--I was always aboard with queer porn's politics (among other things!), but Lee solidifies things for me, because Lee is taking "the personal is the political" very seriously, as I think all feminists ought to do:  Where sexual identity and gender identity (among other identities) intersect with porn performing, there is much to be learned, Lee thinks, and I take them at their word:

My mixed identities have led me to conclude that there’s no right or wrong, no definitive experience, no one way of looking at the world. Nothing is black or white, and that fact is even clearer when you’re gray.

I think their article alone is worth the price of The Feminist Porn Book. 
 
Links:
Lee's site.
The Feminist Porn Book.

Pro-Porn AND Pro-Reality: Cindy Gallop

I appreciate the nuanced take that Cindy Gallop has on how the ubiquity of porn may be affecting our sex lives, especially for those folks who have grown up with the internet.


I do have a couple of problems with her take on things: One, she seems to have ignored, at least for purposes of her presentation, that it's not only young boys who have easy access to porn, but folks of all genders. Secondly, I'd like to see some science done around what folks of all genders and ages really think sex should be like--I suspect many more of them understand that porn represents a few kinds of sex, most of which are pure fantasy. From Gallop's point of view, I'm overly optimistic about how easily people distinguish fantasy from reality.

I'd also love it if the myriad kinds of porn were at least recognized--there is queer porn, gay male porn, bdsm porn, fetish porn, etc. (and I do mean ETC.!)--so, while distinguishing between what happens on screen and what happens in folks' day-to-day sex lives is important, it's also important to recognize that what happens in all of those places has near-infinite variations, for those who want them!

Bonus video: Robin Williams responding directly to Cindy Gallop's talk:

Porn Conversations

I've wanted to write about Robert Jensen's book, Getting Off: The End of Masculinity, ever since it came out, way back in 2007. The book is an anti-porn manifesto, but it also attempts to be a critique of traditional masculinity as well, advocating, as it says in its title, an end to masculinity. For such a slim tome, this is quite a goal, and it falls short.

One of the reasons I've been hesitant to take on Jensen's book in any substantial way has to do with the difficult, vitriolic "discussion" of pornography and sex work both within feminist communities and in the world at large. These are emotional issues (as they should be), and there is an understandable tendency toward oversimplification and over-generalization on all sides of the issue. As with many other issues, especially when they're discussed on the internet, the idea of giving a charitable reading to something sort of goes out the window--and I totally get that, since aspects of Jensen's book make me want to claw my eyes out in frustration, rather than "read charitably".

Which is why I have actually enjoyed the recent discussions between Meghan Murphy and Hugo Schwyzer, which were an attempt to have a conversation about "pornstitution" that would help everybody better understand at least some of the disagreements between (some) sex positive feminists and (some) anti-sex-work feminists (it is difficult to use neutral terms here). Just the attempt to have the discussion was refreshing, and I commend both Megan and Hugo for making the attempt; that said, most of what was clarified for me was the problems with the arguments (and attitudes) of the anti-sex-work folks. Which has led me back to re-reading the Jensen book, and working on some posts about the book, and about the anti-sex-work positions in general.

Before I begin with the book though, a preview of some of the ideas I want to examine, starting with just a little piece of the conversation that Meghan and Hugo had, because I think it highlights a particular theme that the anti-sex-work folks just get wrong.

Can People Choose Sex Work?
Meghan is frustrated with actual sex workers who put themselves forward as examples of people who have chosen to do that kind of work, and who don't consider themselves particularly oppressed. She says:

“Re: the teeny minority of self defined “sex workers” who enjoy it. Since when is enjoyment or pleasure or *feelings* of empowerment–*feelings* in and of themselves- the same as truth or reality? What sort of argument is being made here? Feelings are also socially constructed in a capitalist/patriarchal society: think of mania for commodities; see the mobs going crazy after sports events (like in Vancouver now?). Lots of feeling there: does it mean consumerism and mob-violence is ok? Men feel empowered by raping: so, do we validate rape? Abolitionists of slavery didn’t care what made a few slaves content–slavery is wrong. Selling people is wrong, no matter how content someone is to sell themselves. These ideas about individual empowerment and pleasure are all part of the way we are bamboozled in neoliberalism. Since when has being content with one’s lot stood as an argument that one’s lot is therefore just and right? We don’t have to tell an individual woman “porn star” about what her “experience” is in order to critique the prostitution of women as a societal institution–to critique the demand by men that women’s bodies are for sale.”

But of course people who want their voices heard aren't speaking up because they think their choice means that everybody has the same choice that they do. Instead, some folks who do/did this kind of work offer themselves up as counterexamples to the claims that some radical feminists make that sex-work can't even exist as work, because one can never, ever choose it without being in some sense coerced. Murphy chooses to place the term sex work in scare quotes when talking with Hugo, which follows suit with the idea that there just is no such thing as sex work, because all sex work is coercive. A sex worker who wants Meghan to listen and acknowledge that some porn work is chosen freely isn't asking Meghan to then never critique porn as a larger industry; she (or he, or zie) is asking Meghan to ditch the claim that doing porn can never be a choice.

And clearly there are lots of folks who don't have a free choice--sex trafficking, for instance, is a clear case of coercion (and, because it's obvious coercion, we shouldn't call it sex work. And clearly there are huge problems with the production of pornography--but that still doesn't mean it is the case that folks can never choose to do sex work. Some anti-porn folks acknowledge this, but when they continue to use scare quotes around the phrase sex work, I'm not sure why they don't understand that folks who do sex work feel silenced by that.