The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (14 page)

I’ve heard that “women aren’t visual” line countless times over the decade. It’s an idea that originated with Dr. Alfred Kinsey’s 1950s research and has become embedded in our culture as a biological truth. More current research has shown just how wrong Kinsey was on this point. Dr. Michael Bailey’s oft-quoted study performed at Northwestern University in 2001 found that women were aroused by a wide variety of erotic images, as opposed to men who were more focused on erotic imagery aligned with their particular sexual orientation.
²
In 2004, researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine found that women became fully aroused within two minutes of watching a sexually explicit
film—faster than the average man.
³
Similarly, in 2006, researchers at McGill University used thermal imaging to measure the arousal rates of both men and women when watching adult films. They concluded that there was no difference between men and women in the time it took to become aroused.
⁴

I knew women were turned on by porn and I had the statistics to prove it. Critics asked me what porn for women looked like. I argued repeatedly that facial cum shots didn’t appeal to women; women wanted more romance, kissing, intimacy, and realism. I must admit I became prescriptive at times about what kind of content constituted women’s porn. It seemed easier to just talk about naked men and sensual couples than to get into philosophical discussions about “what women want.” Even so, I often did my best to explain that porn for women was about the audience and the perspective, not the sex acts involved. In 2003, I wrote, “My definition of good porn for women involves depictions of sex where the woman’s pleasure is paramount. It has to be about HER experience of sex, HER pleasure, and HER orgasm. Everything else is really just window dressing.”

The research conducted in 1994 by Ellen Laan at the University of Amsterdam was especially useful in summing up why I was making porn for women. Laan studied whether women’s subjective responses to porn were different to their physical reactions, by showing her subjects different types of porn, including the female-friendly film
Urban Heat
by Candida Royalle. She found that while their physical arousal was constant, “subjective experience of sexual arousal was significantly higher during the woman-made film. The man-made film evoked more feelings of shame, guilt, and aversion.”
⁵
I wanted to offer the good stuff without all the shame, guilt, and aversion.

In 2003, I teamed up with fellow webmistress Jane and we started our own subscription site,
ForTheGirls.com
. I gathered all the stories and articles I’d written and pooled my collection of photos with Jane’s. Our site was created as a one-stop-shop for straight women who wanted to enjoy erotic content in a female-friendly space. We followed the successful formula of hot guys mixed with hetero couples and a bit of erotic variety. Plus, we offered a wide variety of reading material that included feature articles, interviews, reviews, advice, and erotic fiction so our subscribers could say they “only joined for the articles.” The site has grown steadily since then.

In 2004, I set up a linklist and began to write a blog under the pseudonym Ms. Naughty to chronicle new developments in women’s porn, including new sites, books, magazines, and films that catered to women.
Filmmakers like Estelle Joseph, Erika Lust, and Petra Joy created their first films made specifically for women, adding to the genre created by Candida Royalle, Marianna Beck, Tristan Taormino, and Maria Beatty. There was an increasing number of adult sites for straight women including eight major pay sites. The indie magazine
Sweet Action
was launched to much fanfare, and a group of women were developing a women’s erotic cable channel called Inpulse. It seemed that I was part of something big, something that would change the face of porn, and that change was just around the corner.

The reality wasn’t so fabulous. On the whole, the adult industry still didn’t accept the idea that women made up anything other than a miniscule market.

And yet the statistics said otherwise. In 2001, an MSNBC survey found one in eight women were using their work computers to access porn.
⁶
In 2003, Nielsen NetRatings reported that around 28 percent of all porn users were female.
⁷
A survey by
Today’s Christian Woman
online magazine that same year revealed that 34 percent of their (fine, upstanding, Christian) female readers had intentionally indulged in porn. In 2007, Nielsen reported that one in three Australian women used porn in the first three months of that year
⁸
and that thirteen million American women had used porn in a single month.
⁹

During my various discussions on message boards I encountered female webmasters who objected to the concept of porn for women. “Not all women like emotional bullshit,” wrote one webmistress named Jackie. “I am just as tough as any guy, I’ll watch cum-fuck-slut movies and anal gaping and gangbangs and whatever else is out there all day long. I don’t need separate porn made for me.”

My original response to that particular critique of women’s porn was one of frustration. “If you like that stuff, good for you. There’s a ton of it out there, go and enjoy it. But we’re trying to make something for women who don’t like that kind of porn. Why are you denying them that?”

That’s what I was originally trying to do: make porn for women like me, women who weren’t into the circus acts, clichés, stupidity, and misogyny that were common in most mainstream porn. I wanted to make something different, something inclusive. And I thought a lot of women felt the same way. Hell, the sales indicated as much.

But here’s the thing. I admit I was only looking at part of the picture.

Over the course of many online conversations and blog posts, I’ve thrashed out the nebulous issue of porn for women with others and done my best to be open to ideas and criticism.

I’ve seen Jackie’s complaint repeated many times since those early
days and I acknowledge that it’s a legitimate point. Porn for women
is
a problematic phrase because it’s so broad and implies that there is one form of porn that appeals to all women. This is wrong, of course. Women’s erotic tastes are just as expansive and diverse as men’s.

For some, the term has also become prescriptive. Plenty have concluded that it only equals “soft” romantic porn and they find this objectionable because—for them, at least—it embodies the presumption that women are too weak to be able to handle the “hard stuff.”

There’s also the criticism that porn for women is a nonsense phrase because it makes assumptions about women themselves—primarily that they are heterosexual, cisgender, white, and middle class. The concept of creating porn from a female perspective is difficult because not all female perspectives are the same. The sexual experiences of queer, lesbian, and trans women don’t necessarily fit into the porn for women box, at least in terms of how it’s come to be popularly understood.

As someone who has been a champion of porn for women for over twelve years, I originally found it hard to acknowledge the truth of this criticism. I am still keen to defend the phrase because it means so much to me; it signifies my desire and motivation to create a better kind of porn for women like myself who aren’t represented by mainstream porn. And yet I know that it doesn’t sit right with many people. It’s problematic and, in some cases, off-putting. It’s not necessarily the best label for adult material that seeks to cater to women.

Should we replace the phrase “porn for women”? And if so, with what do we replace it?

Before we go there, perhaps we should ask if we still even
need
to cater to women separately. It is 2013, after all. Porn is ubiquitous on the Internet and easily accessible, catering to every imaginable fetish and fantasy. An entire generation of young women has grown up with sexually explicit material available at the touch of a button; for them, a nervous trip into a store to physically buy a dirty magazine is a sepia-toned tale of yesterday. Their tastes have probably been shaped by the porn they’ve seen; perhaps they don’t feel the “shame, guilt, and aversion” of Ellen Laan’s 1994 research subjects. There are plenty of female porn consumers who are perfectly happy with what’s out there already.

And yet today’s pornography is still not particularly female-friendly. The majority of it is still aimed primarily at heterosexual or gay men; the language still speaks to them and male perspectives and male paths to pleasure still get the most priority. Sexist and racist attitudes and language are par for the course in many mainstream films and websites. There is also ongoing concern about the ethical production of porn
and whether the performers are paid and treated well. This latter issue is something that I’ve seen women identify as a problem that prevents them from enjoying porn.

So I think the need still exists to identify adult material that women can feel comfortable with, that doesn’t seek to exclude them, or make them feel bad when they consume it.

Indeed, I should point out here that the desire to see positive, ethical porn is not exclusively a female concern. Plenty of men want to see it too (and this is another problem with the phrase, “porn for women”).

So, if we still want to identify this positive, inclusive type of porn, what is the ideal label for it?

This is a problem for horny straight women. Even today, it can be difficult to source erotic material that fits the bill. Straight women complain that they can’t find good porn. Women are still on the outside. The box covers of straight adult DVDs all feature photos of women, not men. A search of “porn” still brings up hundreds of mainstream websites, most of which talk about “shooting your load” and “your cock” rather than “your clit.” The AVN awards have an oral sex category that only ever features films about blowjobs. The vast majority of hetero adult films still focus the camera on the woman and cut the man out of the frame. And most of them finish with a male orgasm, often without bothering to feature a female orgasm.

This is why I still use the term “porn for women”—even if it is stereotypical, assumptive, problematic, and just plain wrong to some. I still use it because it’s recognizable and it helps horny women find me on the Internet.

If a woman types the phrase into Google, I can offer them a variety of websites including my blog and linklist or my website Porn Movies for Women or my alternative list Quirky Sex. And then I try to help them to find what they want—be it romantic heterosexual sex or kinky Japanese bondage or fucking machines or Tristan Taormino’s latest rough sex film. What I offer may not necessarily be perfect for that surfer, but hopefully she’ll be a bit closer to finding what she wants.

And if they happen to want
ForTheGirls.com
or my other subscription websites or my short films, that’s good too. I am an evil capitalist pornographer, after all.

Capitalism does play an important part in all this. While erotic material may be made purely for artistic reasons, porn is mostly made for profit. Market forces do come into play and tend to shape what kind of material is produced. Given that women still only make up one third of the market, porn still focuses on male consumers. And when it comes
to porn aimed at straight women, there’s still a demand for what is derided as “stereotypical” content. I’m still making a good living offering my particular brand of women’s porn that includes what Jackie called “emotional bullshit.” I still like it and I know that plenty of other straight women—and men—do too.

Perhaps a day is coming when pornography as a whole moves into better territory, when depictions of sex don’t automatically come loaded with sexism or racism or nonsense stereotypes or negativity, as happens so often now. I’m looking forward to that day. It’s what I was hoping for when I started. When that happens, distinctions such as “porn for women” or “feminist porn” may well and truly be irrelevant because all genders, sexualities, experiences, perspectives, fetishes, and desires will have an equal place at the table.

In the meantime, I’ll continue to make my own kind of porn, a single female voice offering my own version of erotica, reflecting my own tastes and aesthetic vision. It won’t appeal to everyone but it will hopefully make a few people horny and happy.

At its heart, I think that is ultimately what feminist porn is all about.

Notes

1
. This essay makes regular use of the word “women” and most often I am talking about heterosexual cisgender women who have always been my target market.

2
. Jaclyn Bertner and Matt Donnely, “Someone’s Getting Turned on For Science,”
Daily Northwestern,
November 29, 2001,
http://www.dailynorthwestern.com/daily/issues/2001/11/29/nyou/m-bailey.shtml
.

3
. Mary Lake Polan et al., “Female Sexual Arousal: A Behavioral Analysis,”
Fertility and Sterility
80, no. 6 (December 2003): 1480–87.

4
. Tuuli M. Kukkonen et al., “Thermography as a Physiological Measure of Sexual Arousal in Both Men and Women,
The Journal of Sexual Medicine
4, no. 1 (January 2007): 93.

5
. Ellen Laan et al., “Women’s Sexual and Emotional Responses to Male- and Female-Produced Erotica,”
Archives of Sexual Behavior
23, no. 2 (1994): 153–69.

6
. “MSNBC Cybersex Survey 2000,”
MSNBC.com
,
http://www.msnbc.com/news/596354.asp
(page on site discontinued).