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.

Feminist Porn In Context

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

Lynn Comella has a great piece in The Feminist Porn Book with the lovely (if academese-ish) title "From Text to Context: Feminist Porn and the Making of a Market" in which she gives us some of the historical of feminist porn as part of a way to contextualize current feminist porn.  Interestingly, this is done as a sort of response to some of the usual critiques by antiporn feminists, which are often "essentialist and reductionist".  Comella tells us:

Sex-positive feminists—those who make, watch, study, and write about pornography—are frequently accused by antipornography feminists of lacking any meaningful critique of the mainstream porn industry. And while antiporn feminists may occasionally acknowledge porn made by and for women, they typically do so only in passing before dismissing it as irrelevant. The reasons for this vary, but include the stance that pornography geared toward women comprises such a small segment of a much larger industry that its effects are virtually negligible, or that porn for women apes, rather than challenges, the dominant codes and conventions used by mainstream pornographers whose sole motivation, according to this narrative, is profit. The notion of “sex-positive synergy” challenges these arguments.

I must admit that the phrase "sex-positive synergy" makes me cringe--but "synergy" is being used as a technical term here:  Comella is making a case that the entire history of sex-positive feminism should be taken into account when examining feminist porn.  Feminist porn didn't arrive in a vacuum, and neither did it come simply as an aping of mainstream porn, as is often portrayed by antiporn folks.  It came as part of a cultural package that included other sex-positive facets of culture, including feminist sex-education efforts, feminist sex toy stores, lesbian feminist products and the like.  

Comella traces several threads of this cultural package which I encourage folks to read--I learned a lot about how many feminist porn creators came to be creating feminist porn--and the part that places like Good Vibrations played in all of this.  

In addition, Comella makes one of the most rigorous responses to Gail Dines, who is famous for armchair-analyzing things she doesn't know much about. Just a tidbit, to whet your appetite:  

The seminar Dines references—although did not attend—was one that I had moderated and helped to organize. In fact, joining me on stage were two feminist sex-toy retailers, Jacq Jones from Sugar in Baltimore and Mattie Fricker from Self Serve in Albuquerque, accompanied by Carol Queen from Good Vibrations, Diana DeVoe, a female porn producer, and Greg DeLong, the founder of Njoy, a sex-positive company that makes high quality, stainless steel sex toys. It was hardly the cesspool of women-hating “tricksters” and “predatory capitalists” that Dines describes; rather, the very composition of the panel reflects the kind of sex-positive synergy and entrepreneurship I’ve discussed throughout this essay.

I love that Comella points out that Dines was basically making shit up, while other feminists were actually doing feminist work.  I plan in the future, when folks who "critique" feminist porn by merely saying that it's aping mainstream porn, to quickly point to Comella's article, which soundly undermines such ideas with, y'know, facts and stuff. 

Bonus! Here's a talk by Comella with some of her research:
Lynn Comella, PhD from New View on Vimeo.

Men! Gail Dines Wants to Save You!

Still working my way (slowly) through The Feminist Porn Book, and still really enjoying it.  I used to be an academic, but no longer consider myself one, so I appreciate how the different writers selected for this book approach the subject from different angles; some of those angles are more traditionally academic than others, as is the case with "Emotional Truths and Thrilling Slide Shows: The Resurgence of Antiporn Feminism", by Feona Attwood and Clarissa Smith.  Attwood and Smith are researchers who wrote this article in part to point out that antiporn feminist analysis has moved away from academic analysis (with, y'know, facts and stuff) and now relies more on the kinds of shock and awe tactics that the religious right has been known for using. 

I appreciate their take on things, in part because they zero in on something that has been bothering me for a while about antiporn analysis, but something I was unable to pinpoint myself:  Antiporn feminist analysis has as an underlying feature the idea that there is good, normal sex that good, normal people have, and there is bad, abnormal sex as is portrayed in porn.  This isn't anitporn feminists' explicit argument, of course, but as Attwood and Smith point out, it's implicit in their change of methods from more academic/scientific methods to methods which are used to get an emotional rise out of folks.  They point out that antiporn folks most often now do a comparative sketch of sexual development, comparing 'normal' sexual development which may or may not have included seeing your older brother's Playboy magazines, as up against current sexual development, which now includes easy access to modern-day porn.  In their analysis of Decca Aitkenhead's ideas, they note:

"In her address to a presumed audience of coupled, heterosexual women, male sexuality is naturalized as inquisitive, but in danger of taking a wrong turn if subjected to the wrong kinds of images at too early an age. Aitkenhead calls upon her readers to reflect on their own experiences of life with men who were schooled in the quaint transgressions of the Kays catalogue, and to envisage the tortured imaginings and sexual mores of future generations of men who, as children, have seen the excesses of bukkake. It is this mangling of what had seemed genuinely yet innocently transgressive in the halcyon days of the 1970s that renders contemporary pornography so potentially threatening, made all the worse by being too easily obtained...This complex narrative of nostalgia and futurology is a central theme of these accounts where pornography is acknowledged as an already existing feature of the landscape, but one that has developed outside the knowledge of “ordinary” adults and needs urgent redress."

Of particular interest to readers of Feminist Allies, however, may be Attwood and Smith's analysis of how antiporn feminists like Gail Dines see themselves as out not only to help women, but to "save men":

The “domino theory” of the passions is invoked here along with a search for increasing levels of stimulation that leads inevitably toward more misogynous and damaging material. Pornography programs men’s sexual instincts and can have only one possible trajectory—to ever more encounters with sexually explicit imagery and toward more and more “extreme” material. Men’s sexuality is figured as totally plastic, intrinsically so—a barely constrained appetite that has to be civilized and ought to be kept away from the inflammatory influence of sexual media for its own good...

...[t]he view that underpins this approach can be usefully compared to the “crystal clear set of guidelines” about sex, set out in evangelical Christian and other conservative antiporn campaigns: “sexual pleasure is for men and women to enjoy inside marriage,” but those who fall from grace and are willing to repent can be forgiven. Under the guise of a politics based on gender equality, antiporn feminist writings are increasingly modeled on this religious approach to porn, though using a medical model of “healthy sex” and discourses that encourage men to see themselves as addicts, or the victims of “grooming” by pornographers or popular culture, as “abused,” “consumed,” and desensitized.

I dig this analysis in part because it shows that many antiporn feminists are using one of the most egregious of patriarchy's fables about men:  That men are animals who can't control themselves sexually in the face of some skin being revealed (or, in the case of modern porn, in the face of seeing people enjoying anal sex, for instance).

They manage to fold in a brief criticism of Robert Jensen's work, which is always a bonus for me--Jensen is a darn good writer, and it's clear to me that his heart is mostly in the right place, which makes the stuff he says all the more frustrating.  Smith and Attwood point out that much of Jensen's analysis of porn is rooted in the idea that there is 'good, normal sex' and 'not-so-good, abnormal sex'.  Good sex is never public, but is always a deep, private experience:

This view of good sex as private rather than public, and clearly linked to love rather than to gratification, is also found in Robert Jensen’s work. Jensen argues that sex should involve “a sense of connection to another person, a greater awareness of one’s own humanity and sometimes, even a profound sense of the world that can come from meaningful and deep sexual experience."

Of course, some sex can include all of that, if we want it to. And some folks will really want to!  But some folks won't want to, or won't want to all of the time!  We are human beings--we create our culture, consciously and unconsciously; we create our sexual culture as well, and as such, there just isn't a normal/abnormal dichotomy that somehow exists apart from what we create. Sure, we can't make up any sexual ethics we want out of whole cloth--we have to consider our interdependence with other human beings and all of the ethical stuff that implies--but we can't look up 'healthy sex' in the dictionary and just do that; no such definition exists, and one definition certainly won't apply to all people.

And I want to thank Attwood and Smith for nicely pointing out that one thing that underlays much of antiporn analysis is the idea that there is some sort of writ-in-stone sexual morality that we need to 'get back to'.  There are good criticisms of some sorts of porn, but in general, folks like Dines and Jensen aren't doing it, and they are implicitly depending on conservative, normative tropes that are not based in the reality of beings that create what is normal.

Listening to Sinnamon Love

"I was naive about the sexual liberation movement, and had never considered whether or not my decision to flaunt my sexuality on screen was a feminist act. I had never wondered whether fighting for the right to be both mother and sex worker was part of a greater fight for the rights of women around the world. I certainly had never given thought to whether my choice to be tied up, disciplined, and fucked by men and women on film contributed to sexual freedom.All I knew was that I alone was responsible for my body, my life, my sexuality, and my bills. It never crossed my mind that someone might tell me what I should or shouldn’t do with my body or my sex".--Sinnamon Love, The Feminist Porn Book

As I talked about in my post on Jiz Lee's contribution to The Feminist Porn Book, I find that listening to folks who work in and produce porn to be one of the best ways to understand how so many of the arguments from anti-porn feminists just don't hold up.  Once we listen to the folks who are actually doing this kind of work, it's easier to understand that this work can be inextricably intertwined with not only straight-up feminist work, but also social justice work around race, class, queerness and the like.  

Sinnamon Love has been in the industry for almost twenty years and, as a black woman, she has the nuanced, complex insight into the industry that one would expect from somebody so experienced.  Racism is rampant in porn (as it is in film, and society in general, of course), and Love gives us all sorts of insights into how her work from inside the system has helped to fight the good social justice fight around race, and in doing so she touches on how "feminism" sometimes needed to take a back seat because of the intense need to de-stigmatize black women's sexuality:

 "I’ve set a goal to enjoy my work so that my fans will enjoy it as well. I find myself more concerned with the representation of black women’s sexuality than making a statement only about my gender. Perhaps this is because so many people fight the good fight on behalf of (white) women and so few are fighting for black women like me. For example, there are countless examples of white women’s sexualities portrayed in porn, but very limited images of African American women. And when you do see black women in porn, they are often stereotyped or demeaned."

As she began to better recognize the negative elements in her workplace, she began to fight them, utilizing feminist ideas and methods (for instance: she became a producer!).  And, as was echoed in Jiz Lee's piece, agency is all-important as regards doing this kind of work:

"There is no doubt in my mind today that I am a feminist....[f]or me it is about agency. My black feminism is about helping women like me to be able to claim their sexuality in the face of decades of mis-education of African American women who were made to believe that they must choose between education, marriage, and family, or sexual freedom...I suppose, if I were to label who I am today, I would call myself a black feminist pornographer. Instead of accepting work merely to insure the bills get paid, I purposefully work for directors and companies that portray black female sexuality in ways that I feel are expansive, progressive, and interesting."

I encourage y'all to read the entire piece in The Feminist Porn Book, as it is packed with so many insights that it was tough to pick the ones I wanted to talk about here.  She covers 19 years in the industry in just a few pages!  It's also a thoroughly "positive" piece, talking about the practical ways that Love has worked to change things in the industry.   

Links:
Sinnamon Love's site
The Feminist Porn Book

 

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.