Sex for Sale~Prostitution, Pornography and the Sex Industry (21 page)

C O N C L U S I O N

Most of the women in my study approach their work as a form of activism.

This activism can take the form of feminism, sex positivity, identity politics, or sex education. A background in activism or sex education are two of their main motivations for entering the pornography industry and these orientations were used in crafting their product. This activist sensibility translates into a desire to create pornography that is an alternative to the mainstream: their porn places women’s pleasure at the center, pays attention to how gender and race are represented, involves products created by women
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WOMEN-MADE PORNOGRAPHY

and for women, and represents the diverse communities to which they belong.

For some, the goal is to make fundamental changes to the mainstream porn industry that will benefit both actors and audiences. Very few cite money as their main motivation and a number of them stress that their work is a labor of love. While money and fame were the major motivating drives for mainstream porn actors in Sharon Abbott’s study, this is not the case for women involved in alternative pornography.

This study bridges the perspectives of the pro-sex feminists and the antipornography feminists. The women in my study see porn as one way for women to take control of their sexuality. At the same time, they are very critical of the mainstream pornography industry and articulate many of the same critiques of that industry as antiporn feminists. My study demonstrates that pornography can be used as activism and also can also generate activism.

On the one hand, many women use pornography as an activist enterprise with which to pursue larger goals (feminism, sex education), while, on the other hand, those who did not use pornography in this way nonetheless find themselves becoming more involved in activism as a result of their involvement in porn. More research needs to be done to assess the impact of women-made pornography on consumers and the pornography industry. But this study shows that sex work debates need to take into account the full range of activist work being done, because the motives and objectives of these activists demonstrate that pornography is richer and more varied than conventional, simplistic representations of the porn industry.

N OTE S

1. Neil Malamuth and Edward Donnerstein, eds.,
Pornography and Sexual
Aggression
, Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1984; Lynne Segal, “Does Pornography Cause Violence? The Search for Evidence,” in P. Gibson and R. Gibson, eds.,
Dirty Looks: Women, Pornography, Power
, London: BFI, 1993; Elizabeth Monk-Turner and H. Christine Purcell, “Sexual Violence in Pornography: How Prevalent Is It?,”
Gender Issues
17 (1999): 58–67; Vernon Padgett, Jo Ann Brislin-Slutz, and James Neal, “Pornography, Erotica, and Attitudes toward Women: The Effects of Repeated Exposure,”

Journal of Sex Research
26 (1989): 479–491; Gloria Cowan and Kerri Dunn,

“What Themes in Pornography Lead to Perceptions of the Degradation of Women?,”
Journal of Sex Research
31 (1994): 11–21; Kimberly Davies,

“Voluntary Exposure to Pornography and Men’s Attitudes toward Feminism and Rape,”
Journal of Sex Research
34 (1997): 131–137.

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JILL A. BAKEHORN

2. Douglas Wallace and Gerald Wehmer, “Pornography and Attitude Change,”
Journal of Sex Research
7 (1971): 116–125; Elaine Hatfield,

“Men’s and Women’s Reactions to Sexually Explicit Films,”
Archives of
Sexual Behavior
7 (1978): 583–592; Kathryn Kelley and Donna Musialowski, “Repeated Exposure to Sexually Explicit Stimuli: Novelty, Sex, and Sexual Attitudes,”
Archives of Sexual Behavior
15 (1986): 487–498; Dolf Zillmann and Jennings Bryant, “Effects of Prolonged Consumption of Pornography on Family Values,”
Journal of Family Issues
9 (1988): 518–544; Daniel Linz, “Exposure to Sexually Explicit Materials and Attitudes toward Rape: A Comparison of Study Results,”
Journal of
Sex Research
26 (1989): 50–84.

3. Don D. Smith, “The Social Content of Pornography,”
Journal of
Communication
, 26 (1976): 16–24; Gloria Cowan, Carole Lee, Daniella Levy, and Debra Snyder, “Dominance and Inequality in X-Rated Videocassettes,”
Psychology of Women Quarterly
12 (1988): 299–311; Gloria Cowan and Robin Campbell, “Racism and Sexism in Interracial Pornography: A Content Analysis,”
Psychology of Women Quarterly
18

(1994): 323–338; Jennifer Lynn Gossett and Sarah Byrne, “‘Click Here’: A Content Analysis of Internet Rape Sites,”
Gender & Society
16 (2002): 689–709.

4. Kenneth Perkins and James Skipper, “Gay Pornographic and Sex Paraphernalia Shops: An Ethnography of Expressive Work Settings,”

Deviant Behavior
2 (1981): 187–199; Richard Tewksbury, “Patrons of Porn: Research Notes on the Clientele of Adult Bookstores,”
Deviant
Behavior
11 (1990): 259–271; Michael Carl Stein,
The Ethnography of an
Adult Bookstore: Private Scenes, Public Spaces
, Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990.

5. Louis Zurcher, R. George Kirkpatrick, Robert Cushing, and Charles Bowman, “The Anti-Pornography Campaign: A Symbolic Crusade,”

Social Problems
19 (1971): 217–238; Louis Zurcher, R. George Kirkpatrick, Robert Cushing, and Charles Bowman, “Ad Hoc Antipornography Organizations and Their Active Members,”
Journal of
Social Issues
29 (1973): 69–94; R George Kirkpatrick and Louis Zurcher,

“Women against Pornography: Feminist Anti-Pornography Crusades in American Society,”
International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy
3

(1983): 1–30; Cecil Greek and William Thompson, “Antipornography Campaigns: Saving the Family in America and England,”
International
Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society
5 (1992): 601–616; Andrea Friedman, “Sadists and Sissies: Anti-Pornography Campaigns in Cold War America,”
Gender & History
15 (2003): 201–227.

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6. There is a recent trend toward more writing on the topic. See: Terralee Bensinger, “Lesbian Pornography: The Re/Making of (a) Community,”

Discourse
15 (1992): 69–93; Dana Collins, “Lesbian Pornographic Production: Creating Social/Cultural Space for Subverting Representations of Sexuality,”
Berkeley Journal of Sociology
43 (1998–1999): 31–62; Esther Sonnet, “Erotic Fiction by Women for Women: The Pleasures of Post-Feminist Heterosexuality,”
Sexualities
2 (1999): 167–187; Simon Hardy, “More Black Lace: Women, Eroticism, and Subjecthood,”

Sexualities
4 (2001): 435–453; Danielle DeVoss, “Women’s Porn Sites: Spaces of Fissure and Eruption or ‘I’m a Little Bit of Everything’,”

Sexuality and Culture
, 6 (2002): 75–94; Clarissa Smith, “‘They’re Ordinary People, Not Aliens from the Planet Sex!’: The Mundane Excitements of Pornography for Women,”
Journal of Mundane Behavior
3

(2002); James Beggan and Scott Allison, “Reflexivity in the Pornographic Films of Candida Royalle,”
Sexualities
6 (2003): 301–324; Karen Ciclitira, “Pornography, Women, and Feminism: Between Pleasure and Politics,”
Sexualities
7 (2004): 281–301; Z. Fareen Parvez, “The Labor of Pleasure: How Perceptions of Emotional Labor Impact Women’s Enjoyment of Pornography,”
Gender and Society
20 (2006): 605–631.

7. See also Robert Stoller and I. S. Levine,
Coming Attractions: The Making of
an X-Rated Video
, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.

8. I was not paid for my services on the sets. The directors and producers and I had an arrangement whereby I would have access to the sites for my research and in exchange would help with the productions. Everyone on the set, both cast and crew, was told that I was a researcher and everyone gave informed consent to be part of the research.

9. George Becker, “The Social Regulation of Sexuality: A Cross-Cultural Perspective,”
Current Perspectives in Social Theory
5 (1984): 45–69.

10. Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in
American Feminist Thought at Century’s End: A Reader
, L.S.

Kauffman, ed., Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993.

11. Adult Video News is an industry trade publication, and AVN hosts an annual banquet where they hand out awards to actors, directors, and films in various categories.

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2

STRIPPING AND TELEPHONE SEX

H A P T E

C

R

5

GENDER AND SPACE IN STRIP CLUBS

Katherine Frank and Michelle Carnes

I like to dance, I like to feel like maybe for a moment in time, whoever is watching
is laughing, lusting, looking. . . .Whatever problem they’re going through,
they’re not thinking about it ‘cause they’re lookin’ at what I’m doing.

—Oohzee, black performer at lesbian strip shows
(A Taste of Oohzee, 2007)

The academic literature on stripping and strip clubs has been steadily growing over the last two decades, often focusing on issues of exploitation or empowerment with regard to the interaction between dancers and their customers, but also taking up issues of deviance, regulation, authenticity, performance, and working conditions.1 In a recent article, Sheila Jeffreys argues that much of the literature on stripping exemplifies a “decon-textualized individualism”—through the focus on dancers’ agency and empowerment—that does not adequately incorporate broader systems of gendered privilege.2 Using media reports as her evidence, Jeffreys argues that because of “their role in the growth of international capitalism and organized crime, the masculinizing effects of club patronage on male buyers, the subordination of hundreds of thousands of women in the clubs, and the exclusion of women from equal opportunities in national and international professional business networks,” strip clubs are exploitative in and of themselves and that the “harmful Western practice of stripping . . . signifies inequality.”3

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KATHERINE FRANK AND MICHELLE CARNES

Beyond the fact that “media reports” are not an adequate means of determining the potential “harm” involved in erotic labor, Jeffreys oversimplifies stripping. She writes: “Rather than empowering women, the strip club boom, as this article will contend, helps to compensate men for lost privileges.”4 By contrast, many feminist researchers emphasize the potential for the practice of stripping to
both
empower women and to compensate men or to reproduce existing systems of power and privilege.5 Further, Jeffreys is not the first to suggest that the field be expanded beyond the gendered exchanges that take place onsite between sex workers and their customers.6 Although her approach and conclusions are extremely different from Jeffreys, for example, Agustín notes that the frameworks commonly used to study sex work more generally are “fixed almost exclusively on the women who sell sex” (and, increasingly, the men who purchase it), thus ignoring “the great majority of phenomena that make up the sex industry.” She suggests the adoption of a cultural studies approach that:

[W]ould look at commercial sex in its widest sense, examining its intersections with art, ethics, consumption, family life, entertainment, sports, economics, urban space, sexuality, tourism and criminality, not omitting issues of race, class, gender, identity, and citizenship. An approach that considers commercial sex as culture would look for the everyday practices involved and try to reveal how our societies distinguish between activities considered normatively “social” and activities denounced as morally wrong. This means examining a range of activities that take in both commerce and sex.7

Considering Agustín’s framework in the specific case of strip clubs, Frank suggests many other possible areas of inquiry for researchers, many of which still concern power and inequalities but might situate strip club transactions in a broader context and open up new realms of exploration.8 Despite the academic interest in stripping, then, there are many aspects of this particular form of legal adult entertainment that are just beginning to be explored.

This chapter takes up that challenge, along with Weitzer’s call to move beyond either the simple condemnation or romanticization of the sex industry.9 We present a comparative look at the creation of strip club space for (primarily) heterosexually identified male customers and for black same-sex desiring women (hereafter, BSSDW).10 In doing so, we take up issues of gender, race, privilege, and regulation as they emerge in this particular form of adult entertainment. We argue that the meaning and impact of stripping may be best understood by exploring the specific configurations of privilege impacting different types of entertainment sites and shaping the meaning of the transactions that unfold within them.

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GENDER AND SPACE IN STRIP CLUBS

Strip clubs for heterosexually identified men are certainly the most ubiquitous venues in the contemporary United States, existing in small towns as well as urban areas. Their status as legal venues for adult entertainment is repeatedly challenged by local municipalities and they can be “lightning rods”

for conflict over regulation,11 yet strip clubs catering to straight men are still relatively mainstream. Women are occasionally seen as customers in strip clubs featuring female dancers, and a much smaller number of clubs featuring male dancers draw female crowds. In general, though, women do not exist as strip club customers in the same numbers as men; many events for women are actually weekly or monthly takeovers of strip clubs designed for men. Women may buy tickets to see the Chippendales or the Thunder Down Under for special occasions such as bachelorette parties; more rarely are they
regulars
at clubs featuring male exotic dancers (which often cater to gay men). Strip events for lesbian audiences are “the least visible in terms of a public street presence.”12