Tristan Taormino on feminist/ethical porn.

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Tristan Taormino is, to use a well-worn cliche, an unstoppable force of nature. She's an icon within the adult sex education world (her porn-educational videos are widely-regarded as über-awesome), and is a pioneer of the feminist porn movement (check her bio here). Here website PuckerUp is a great resource for everything related to sex.

A while back, she posted a piece on feminist porn and its history. I'd say it's the go-to for an accurate and detailed account of the movement, and how and why it originated. Here's the opening:

What Is Feminist Porn?

Feminists have hotly debated pornography since the Women’s Movement began, and the debate reached an infamous fever pitch during the Feminist Sex Wars of the 1980s. While there is no one production considered the first example of feminist porn (and, in fact, there must be images and films created even before the term ‘feminist’ was first used), feminist porn has its roots in the 1980s. The modern feminist porn movement gained serious momentum in the 2000s thanks in large part to the creation of The Feminist Porn Awards (FPAs) by Good For Her in Toronto in 2006, which put the concept of feminist porn on the map. The FPAs raised awareness about feminist porn among a wider audience, prompted more media coverage (see:Bitch, San Francisco Chronicle, and even MTV Canada), and helped coalesce a community of filmmakers, performers, and fans. There is no easy answer to the question, “What is feminist porn?” because there is no singular definition of feminist porn, but rather multiple ideas and definitions.

Let’s begin with a brief history. Annie Sprinkle began performing in porn movies in 1973. In 1981, she produced and starred in the film Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle, which is described on her website as “innovative for its time, as it showed the women as sexual aggressors, focused on the female orgasm, and Annie spoke directly into the camera to the viewers from the heart.” She also starred in and directed two experimental, explicit, “docudramas” in 1992: Linda/Les & Annie: The First Female-to-Male Transsexual Love Story and Sluts and Goddesses Video Workshop, which are considered cult classics and feminist porn prototypes.[1]

Go read the rest here.

Here's an excellent interview with her discussing ethical porn, female sexual agency and pleasure, and why porn isn't always anti-women:


Melissa Gira Grant interview.

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From BitchMedia:

 

Recognize That Sex Work is Work: A Conversation with Melissa Gira Grant by Jamie J. Hagen

[…]

JAMIE HAGEN: In your book, you emphasize sex work is not about feelings, it’s about money. You recognize sex work as labor. This seems like an incredibly powerful shift in perspective that is outside of much of the current dialogue about sex workers.

MELISSA GIRA GRANT: I think that’s because most of the current dialogue about sex workers actually is not initiated by sex workers.

When people who talk about sex work have no grounding in experience, of course it’s going to go to those things where they believe that they have expertise. Some of those things might be their feelings about the existence of the sex industry.

I was just watching a very odd response go down on Facebook to the Belabored podcast I did yesterday. We spent 45 minutes talking about sex work as work, everything you just stated in your question, and it took about five seconds for some guy to jump in and say, “But what about the johns?” It’s a kind of derailing that I think happens in like every conversation about gender and sexuality pretty much ever!

It’s akin to “concern trolling.”

It is! It is like a concern trolling. “Your experience might be one thing, but what I’m concerned about is how I feel about it.” Unfortunately, that kind of derailing into the feelings of those people outside of sex work is the place where policy is made.

[…]

At one point in your book you address the fact that sex workers aren’t allowed the role of being a whole women by those who seek to save them. Within this framework, there isn’t much room for conversation about agency and empowerment for sex workers.

The whole woman thing comes from a confluence of narratives, whether that’s the media or even some of the feminist narratives around sex work. I’ve been spending a lot of time lately looking at the religious right anti-trafficking projects. In some ways, those seem like a revival of the Promise Keepers and they talk a lot about restoration and mending the soul, this idea that the sex worker is like an injured person who can never be whole.

You find that on the left and on the right, secular and religious kind of tropes. So of course that’s going to pop up in the media. That’s how people imagine sex workers. If they’re not whole, then they don’t have voices and they need other people to speak for them because their voices and their stories are suspect. I think that’s what really lets the media off the hook. That’s why you see these tropes so persistently because it doesn’t even seem to occur to people that sex workers might have the capacity to dispute them.

In my academic work I look a lot at the question of women’s silence and agency. In the predominant discourse used today it seems you’re a sex worker (or prostitute) or you’ve been raped and therefore “victim” is your category.

And, well, it makes it very easy for the people on the outside to then create a roll for themselves right? So if there are people who are injured then they need a rescuer, they need a savior. You even see that in humanitarian work where on the one hand people might view themselves as coming in and empowering people who might need their help, but it’s still a very fraught relationship - power dynamics there are pretty intense.

The tropes around the injured woman who then needs our outside intervention to save her, they go far beyond sex work but they are one of the things I think in sex work that people least often question.

You can find links to her work and book, and read the rest of the interview, here.

The amazing Jiz Lee.

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Jiz Lee is central figure in a new generation of queer porn performers who are pushing all the boundaries, breaking down the stereotypes, and generally taking the industry by storm. Along with the people like Buck Angel, she's transforming porn from the inside out (or, at the very least, vastly expanding its horizons). Queer porn, more so than any of the other genres of porn, has promoted the feminist, sex-positive, ethical model of porn production. That's not to say it's vanilla - it can be as hardcore as hardcore gets.

From  an interview with The Scavenger:

What implications does this have for the predominantly heterosexual porn industry, with seemingly rigid gender binaries?

I hope that it will expand the industry's language and understanding; and perhaps allow for less rigid ‘rules’ of aesthetics and roles between male and female gender identities.

Some directors are very open and it is exciting as a performer familiar with indie/queer companies to work with people who ‘get it’. It feels incredible.

[...]

Contrary to the accusations that porn is exploitative of women, porn can be a space where you are able control your body and body images. How are you able to do this within the industry?

...As a performer, I have to create my own path and spaces, and be extremely conscious of how my image will be presented. I select who I work with based on whether I think they understand me and will not only let me express my sexuality freely, but also promote my image in a way that feels authentic to me.

I like doing work that I am proud of. In the years I have been performing, I’ve explored work with other companies and directors almost like a sexual relationship with the studios themselves. There is a relationship built through projects with the people behind them.

Most of them act like long-time lovers; though I’ve also had a few ‘one-night stands’ in some regards with projects that weren’t a good fit. That’s taught me a lot. I try not to dwell on the negative but to grow from it, so these encounters have and will continue to inform how I can best present myself.

Overall, I’m happy and satisfied in my career and the choices I’ve made and the successes I’ve experienced. My organic process of trusting my intuitions and being true to myself has led me to meet and perform with some of the most amazing people, and some of my dearest friends.

Read the rest of the interview here.

Jiz Lee is also a very active blogger - check her blog here.

And an interview with QueerPornTV:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJ96OEckj9g

Furries.

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Furries are into anthropomorphic animal characters (i.e., with human characteristics and personalities). For some, this fascination is sexualized.

The following clip is from a furry fan's collection. There are far more explicit images out there, many featuring various types of sex.

Touching men's boxer shorts fires up women's reward system.

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From the Huffington Post and Scientific America:

Touching Men's Sexy Boxer Shorts Activates Brain's Reward System In Women, Study Suggests by Kathleen D

It is often said that women and men are more different than similar. That’s not even mostly true; women and men are pretty similar. But there are a few spheres in which there are strong gender differences. One of them is sex.

Men want sex more than women do. (While I am sure that you can think of people who don’t fit this pattern, my colleagues and I have arrived at this conclusion after reviewing hundreds of findings. It is, on average, a very robust finding.) This difference is due in part to the fact that men, compared to women, focus on the rewards of sex. Women tend to focus on its costs because having sex presents them with bigger potential downsides, from physical (the toll of bearing a child) to social (stigma).

Accordingly, the average man’s sexual system gets activated fairly easily. When it does, it trips off a whole system in the brain focused on rewards. In fact, merely seeing a bra can propel men into reward mode, seeking immediate satisfaction in their decisions.

Most of the evidence suggests that women are different, that a sexy object would not cause them to shift into reward mode. This goes back to the notion that sex is rife with potential costs for women. Yet, at a basic biological level, the sexual system is directly tied to the reward system (through pleasure-giving dopaminergic reactions). This would seem to suggest a contrasting hypothesis that perhaps women will also shift into reward mode when their sexual system is activated.

Anouk Festjens, Sabrina Bruyneel, and Siegfried Dewitte, researchers in Belgium, wanted to test this idea. But first they needed to find a way to activate women’s sex drive. Women, more than men, connect sex to emotions. Festjens and colleagues therefore used a subtle, emotional cue to initiate sexual motivation – touch. Across three experiments, Festjens and colleagues found that women who touched sexy male clothing items, compared to nonsexual clothing items, showed evidence of being in reward mode.

Read the rest here.