The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (12 page)

Even if there was a lot of porn that I didn’t much like, I felt it was basically benign. But I still had to confront my feelings of having betrayed my sisters in the movement. On numerous occasions I’d been challenged about the contradiction of being an active feminist who also performed in porn movies, as if one naturally precluded the other. I could never come up with a satisfactory answer, other than to say it was my body to do with what I wanted. But most people still disapproved of porn and I had to admit that, despite my years spent giddily flying in the face of convention, I did care about what others thought of me. I wished I didn’t, but there was no use in lying to myself. So why, with all the training and education I had under my belt, would I choose to do work that is shunned by most of society and would ultimately limit my future career options? (Don’t let the moderate crossover success of Tracy Lords or even Sasha Grey fool you into thinking the taboo has been lifted: as I always point out, we still live in a culture that avidly consumes porn while judging and marginalizing the women who perform in it.) It’s true that many of the women who enter the field of sex work do it for less than positive
reasons, such as to act out feelings of worthlessness or self-loathing. But there are also many women who do it because they enjoy sex and like the idea of having sex for money, or at least find it far less oppressive and more lucrative than some of their other options. My reasons contained elements of each of these scenarios. I found being in porn movies easier than giving all my time to a job I had no interest in. And I also began to understand the deeper psychological reasons that led me to porn. I believed that my natural gifts weren’t enough to gain my estranged father’s love and approval. Steeped in a culture that conveys to young girls that our greatest asset is our desirability, I came to the conclusion that my sexuality was the way to fulfill my needs. And what better way to secure the love and approval I so longed for than becoming a sought-after porn star?

My time in counseling was bringing me the peace and self-acceptance I longed for. But while I thought my introspective journey would bring closure to the porn chapter of my life, it launched me more deeply into the world of porn than I could have ever imagined. As I was gaining the clarity and self-compassion I needed to move on with my life, a certain curiosity began to take over. I found myself wondering what porn movies that appealed to women might look like. I also began to feel a desire to give something back to women after performing in male-identified porn that left women out. So why not create adult films that deliver useful information about sex and that represent women’s desire? After all, until recently, porn had been for many people their only source of sexual information. I began to see its potential as a way of educating while entertaining its viewers, thus giving back to both women and couples who sought to better understand each other’s needs.

By 1983, several cultural events had come together to create the perfect moment for this concept to flourish. The women’s movement had given women permission to explore their sexuality. They were curious to view sexy movies, but the majority of women were not comfortable with what they found in existing porn. As it turned out, many men, too, were also looking for something different, and they wanted to find movies their partners might enjoy. At the same time cable TV and the VCR came onto the market and suddenly there was a way to view movies in the privacy of your home. Now women could sneak a peek in the safety of their own domains and couples could enjoy them privately, rather than sitting among questionable guys in raincoats, in dark seedy theaters with sticky floors. Now all they needed were the movies—and that’s where I came in.

I welcomed the challenge of creating explicit erotica that was exciting,
skillfully done, and above all, female positive. I was convinced there was a commercial market for this and I was determined to prove it. As an added incentive, any hope of putting Candida Royalle to rest was lost once porn from the 1970s became available on video and cable TV. Stepping behind the camera allowed me to create movies that I felt proud to be associated with. It was my way of giving something back while reclaiming my name, and helping women feel more comfortable with their sexuality. We still lived in a world where “good girls don’t,” where female characters with strong, active sex drives in movies and on TV had to be punished or show retribution for their sins. I believed adult entertainment could be a tool for sexual knowledge and empowerment for women, and could help men understand how women feel and what they want.

I knew that the most important element that had to change was the erotic depiction. I wasn’t interested in creating the typical soap opera story line most producers thought women wanted, and then cutting to the usual formulaic sex once it was time for a sex scene. Enter my first business partner, Lauren Neimi, a talented photographer with a great idea: erotic rock videos from a female perspective. MTV was all the rage then, and Lauren had come to New York looking for backers. A friend of mine overheard her pitching her idea and suggested she talk to me. I thought it was the perfect solution. My husband’s father was a successful producer and distributor in Europe who had invested in several big-budget American erotic features, and had mentioned a few times that he thought I would make a good director, so upon hearing our concept he offered to finance it. As all the pieces fell remarkably into place with an ease that felt predetermined by fate, I gave up the notion of leaving Candida Royalle behind and surrendered to what seemed to be my calling.

In early 1984 Lauren and I created Femme Productions. We watched a variety of porn and erotica to help us determine how we would make our work different and more female-oriented. First, we agreed the sex would be explicit. We weren’t interested in overly graphic shots of giant genitalia or what we called the “gynecological close-up,” but we also weren’t interested in promoting the idea that genitals are ugly and must be hidden from view. As would be confirmed by letters we received, viewers wanted to see it all, but they wanted to see it done with taste and subtlety rather than having it rubbed in their face. Second, the almighty money shot had to go. We figured that with 99.9 percent of all porn ending every scene with a cum shot, it was time that people had an alternative. We preferred to show people’s faces while climaxing, or their hands gripping, or their bodies or butts contracting. And third, the porn formula
had to go. We wanted to throw it out and start fresh, to focus less on genitalia and more on sensuality. We wanted to portray a sense of connectedness, tenderness, communication, passion, excitement, and longing. We wanted to portray women with real bodies, of all ages and types, who our female viewers could relate to and identify with, and men who seemed to care about their partners, who wanted to please and satisfy them.

On a technical level, we had to create a whole new way of shooting. In traditional porn, it looks mechanical because it
is
mechanical. You’re basically shooting from a checklist and you’ve got to get plenty of footage of each type of sex act, from all the standard angles, to fulfill your obligations to your distributor. So you might set up the lights and cameras to shoot about twenty minutes worth of fellatio from one angle, and then stop and reset the lights and cameras to shoot it from another angle, and so on. Clearly this leaves little room for spontaneity and makes the work of the actor much tougher as he attempts to maintain his erection while the actress does her best to keep him excited during all this stop-and-go setup for hours on end.

Lauren and I employed a more cinema vérité style of shooting where very little was predetermined, other than discussing with the performers what sorts of things we thought their characters might do and the sorts of things we’d like to see. We allowed them to bring something of themselves to the scene while staying in character, even if it was a simple fantasy vignette, as in our early work. Allowing them to have a say about whom they worked with, our first choice being real couples, insured a more authentic sense of desire. At the same time we allowed our camera people free rein to move around the lovers unrestricted by pre-set angles and positions, catching moments as they happened.

Whether it was me or Lauren directing, we would try to sit close enough to both the actors and the camera person(s) to be able to whisper direction to them while remaining as unobtrusive as possible. Over time, as I incorporated more detailed story lines that necessitated more staging and storyboarding, I still maintained the same approach to filming the erotic scenes. When it worked, what resulted was an intimacy between the actors, the person behind the camera, and the director, that led to a feeling of pure magic. You just knew when you had created something special, something that would touch people on a deep, erotic level. It didn’t always turn out that way, but I felt a great sense of joy and accomplishment when it did.

As Lauren and I experimented and worked out this new style of making porn in the early stages of Femme, it seemed so easy to us that we
marveled over the fact that no one else had thought to do this. Of course, no one else had because the idea of a women’s or couples’ market for porn was completely unheard of. My father-in-law’s offer to finance our concept had come with a condition: I had to first find a distributor. This turned out to be our biggest challenge. When most of the major adult companies patted me on the head and informed me that there was no such market—“this is a boy’s club,” said one of them—that just made me even more determined. I knew they were wrong. I finally got one of the better-known companies, VCA Pictures, to agree to distribute our movies, and with little marketing and promotion, our first three Femme videos,
Femme
(1984),
Urban Heat
(1984), and
Christine’s Secret
(1986), were met with overwhelming enthusiasm and commercial success.

After our first year, Lauren moved on to pursue other projects and I continued on with Femme. In 1986, my husband and I started Femme Distribution, negotiated with VCA to get back our first three titles, and took on the domestic and international distribution of the Femme line. We produced five more titles, including the three-volume Star Director Series, in which I invited four other close friends who had been adult film stars—Annie Sprinkle, Gloria Leonard, Veronica Vera, and Veronica Hart—to write and direct their own short stories. In the meantime, to reach the demographic I was targeting without having to spend big advertising dollars, I put to use what I learned in my college public-speaking course and became the spokesperson for Femme. I knew the media would eat up a story about a former porn star who dared to take on the male-dominated porn industry, and it didn’t hurt that I wasn’t at all what they expected to find when they came to interview me. Once we went into distribution I moved out of my home office and into a loft in the up-and-coming, hip SoHo area of Manhattan, and instead of being greeted by a blond, buxom nymphet from Porn Valley, they were welcomed by a spiky salt-and-pepper-haired woman who was very New York. I had my detractors, but most members of the press got what I was trying to do and appreciated the inroads I was making.

Over time Femme had garnered an impressive media presence that included
Time, Glamour,
the
New York Times, Times of London,
and countless more publications and appearances on nearly every major TV show including
The Phil Donahue Show,
where I, a nervous newbie in political debate, successfully squared off with Catherine MacKinnon. I had succeeded in creating enough demand for my line that retailers were forced to stock it if they wanted to get in on the new and growing women’s and couples’ market.

In 1988 my husband and I separated, and I began to oversee both
production and distribution. After a few years, I was exhausted and realized I couldn’t be both the creative director and the distributor. In 1995 I approached PHE, Inc./Adam and Eve, a company owned by Phil Harvey, who was known for his political and philanthropic work, and after a year of negotiating, the company started their own wholesale distribution division with my Femme line and agreed to finance my work. Adding ten more features to my line, including
AfroDite Superstar
(2006), the first to fall under my multiethnic line, “Femme Chocolat,” Femme now boasts a line of eighteen titles. My latest endeavor has been to launch the work of other women erotic film directors whose visions are new and innovative.

Perhaps my greatest pride comes from the many letters and emails I have received from men and women over the years thanking me for creating adult movies that made them feel good about sex and provided a much needed boost to a long-term marriage burdened by the demands of children and the challenges of busy lives. Second to that is having been embraced by the sexology field and the many marriage and sex counselors who feel comfortable suggesting my work to women and couples they think it would help. In 1988 Dr. Sandra Cole, who was at that time president of the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors, and Therapists (AASECT), asked me to speak at their annual national conference. In 1992 they screened my fourth movie,
Three Daughters,
a coming-of-age story that includes a scene of the parents’ sexual rediscovery. AASECT endorsed it for “promoting positive sexual role-modeling.”

So can porn coexist with the principles of feminism? Was I continuing to betray my sisters? Or had I helped to create an environment in which women could express their own unique sexual visions on film and video? Early on, the press began to label me a “feminist pornographer,” an oxymoron to some, an attention-getting headline for others. I never set out to make “feminist” movies—“humanist” might be more accurate—and I’ve always hated the P-word. For me, “pornography” conjured up images of plastic women mechanically performing sex on men who were mostly unattractive, and sex that was devoid of feeling, boring at best, repulsive at worst. Erotica sounded pretentious and ambiguous. But there is no other word that grabs people’s attention the way the P-word does. It made people aware of my work but it didn’t necessarily help me reach the market I sought. In the 1980s and even much of the 1990s, just the mention of porn would turn most women off. Now “porn” is the new, hip, updated word for pornography. It has come to mean something that’s daring, defiant. Just as women disempowered the “slut” epithet which was long used to silence those who might want to pursue as active a sex life as some men do, I understand that today’s
young women have claimed the word “porn” to rebel against the notion that women only want soft, genteel erotica.