| When I first started writing this column 12 years ago, porn and feminism weren’t exactly fond of each other.
"Pornography is the theory. Rape is the practice," was the line being toed by anti-porn crusaders Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon.
Part of the reason I started my column was that I wasn’t quite comfortable toeing the line. After all, I was a feminist. I watched porn. And I liked some of it.
So, it was with great excitement that I found myself onstage two weeks ago at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto at the very first Feminist Porn Awards presenting the very first award for "Best Anal Adventure" to Tristan Taormino for her film House of Ass.
"Here’s to someone who gets it," I beamed with pride as I handed Tristan her Emma award – a glass butt plug mounted on a trophy stand – named after Canadian pro-sex feminist pioneer Emma Goldman.
The mood of the 300-strong crowd that evening was practically giddy as Emmas for Best Smutty Schoolteacher (Betty Dodson for her Educational film Orgasmic Women), Fiercest Female Orgasm (Nina Hartley’s Guide to Double Penetration), Indie Porn Producer (Dana Dane of Erocktavision) and Lifetime Achievement in Women’s Erotica (Candida Royalle) were awarded to the crème de la crème of smut for girls.
What exactly is feminist porn?
According to the founders of the awards, Good For Her, a women-oriented sex shop in Toronto (goodforher.com), the winning films had to meet three criteria: (a) they had to show genuine female pleasure (in other words, no faking it); (b) they had to be directed or produced by a woman; and (c) they had to "expand the range of female sexual expression currently seen in porn.
Oh, and they had to be hot.
Made perfect sense to me. Porn has traditionally been a male-dominated industry. Celebrating the fact that women had made any inroads at all seemed like a no-brainer.
Still, put "women" and "porn" in the same sentence and you’re bound to get a few people’s knickers in a twist. Some reactions were a scary throwback to those lovely backlash days in the early ’90s, when feminists were branded "man-hating Feminazis."
On the weekly radio segment I do on The Edge in Toronto, the three male hosts made jokes about how the evening was no doubt just a bunch of hairy-legged lesbians who "were probably ugly."
Nice.
Some reactions were slightly more indifferent, running along the lines of: "Lots of women watch porn. Nothing new. Why do they need their own awards?"
And, not surprisingly, a few of the old anti-porn feminist arguments reared their heads. "All porn objectifies women and calling it ‘feminist’ doesn’t change that," one woman said to me.
"Oh lovely, now we have something called ‘feminist porn,’" wrote another woman on a forum about the awards on feministing.com. "What's next, ‘The Battered Wife of the Year Awards?’ or maybe ‘The Proud to be Degraded Festival for Young Feminists?’"
I think putting feminist porn in the same category as battered women is a bit much, but I do think she raises an interesting point.
Is "feminist porn" an oxymoron?
Not for Tristan Taormino, who, in a panel on feminism and porn right before the awards, described her definition of feminist porn.
"It’s all about creating a fair working environment and empowering everyone involved — both men and women — to have a say in the representation of their sexuality rather than simply having me tell them what to do."
Fair-trade porn, if you will.
Good For Her manager Chanelle Gallant believes that, "Good porn is a human right" and says feminist porn is all about creating "sexual images that make us feel good about ourselves and about sex."
Still, as some of the women on the feministing.com forum argued, no matter who creates the images and how much the women in these films get off, porn is inherently exploitative and the majority of its consumers are still men who get off on images of women, feminist or not. So-called feminist porn will remain in the margins because, as one woman posted, "women (feminist or otherwise) and feminist men account for near zero of the porno-buying market."
The only beneficiaries of these awards, she goes on to say, will be "1) the mainstream porn industry thanks to the positive exposure of porn and 2) the massively male majority of pornography consumers who will now be watching ‘fetish’ films depicting a ‘feminist’ taking it up the ass."
Hmmm… she may be right that feminist porn may never reach mainstream status, but it’s clear to me from the letters I get from women looking for porn that "speaks to them," as one reader recently put it, that women (and yes, some guys, too) desire an alternative.
And simply throwing up your hands and saying that creating it won’t change the big picture is cynical and kinda sad.
As for smut being inherently exploitative, well, that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? As one contributor to the feministing.com forum put it:
"…you’re exploiting people to get yourself off. So either we need to have a more expansive view of the nature of exploitation, or we need to have a drastic upheaval of sexual arousal; so that exploitation becomes unsexy, and we can only get off to completely unexploited characters and themes."
And that’s hot, right?
Not every woman has to like porn or even support its existence – I just think that the women who do, deserve something better.
As someone at the awards said: "The answer to bad porn isn't no porn, it's better porn." |
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