The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (42 page)

6
. Here I am drawing from Kimberlé Crenshaw’s foundational article on intersectionality, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,”
Stanford Law Review
43, no. 6 (July 1991): 1241–99.

7
. Identifying as a black feminist for me means maintaining an interest in and a commitment to knowledge production (scholarly, artistically, and culturally) both by and about the heterogeneous experience of black women as well as believing in the empowerment such knowledge production engenders and the oppression it works to disintegrate.

8
. Audre Lorde offers one of the most untraditional, powerful, and still radical, conceptualizations of the erotic. Lorde’s erotic is not necessarily sexual; it is a source of power and knowledge women need to reclaim their “deeply female and spiritual plane.” As a “life force of women” this erotic is present in all aspects of women’s daily existence and our interactions with others, not merely sexual exchanges and physical relationships. Yet, while Lord’s reclaiming and reconceptualization of the erotic may offer a vehicle away from sexual repression for some women and a possibility for finding and sharing joy, I ultimately find problematic a number of issues in her view of the erotic. First, it disavows the possibility for a male erotic or a male access to and of the erotic. The homogenous, essentialized male is vilified as the cause of women’s (also a falsely homogenous group) repression of the erotic in a way that teleologically fixes a kind of institutional patriarchal sexual hegemony and heternormative policing of women’s erotic power. Second, in its situating of pornography and the erotic as two “diametrically opposed uses of the sexual,” it unjustly demonizes pornography. Pornographic pleasure becomes reduced to a type of suppression and lack of sensation. For more see Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches
(Berkeley: The Crossing Press, 1984), 53–59. Also reprinted in
Feminism & Pornography,
ed. Drucilla Cornell (London: Oxford University Press, 2000), 569–74.

9
. M. Jacqui Alexander, “Erotic Autonomy as a Politics of Decolonization,” in
Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures,
eds. M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty (New York: Routledge, 1997), 63–100.

10
. Here, the term sexual liberals is borrowed from Ann Russo who uses the term to “refer to feminist and progressive writers, scholars and activists who criticize the feminist anti-pornography movement on the grounds of potential infringement on individual rights to sexual identity, sexual expression, individual interpretation, freedom of speech and privacy.” See Ann Russo, “Feminists Confront Pornography’s Subordinating Practices,” in
Pornography: The Production and Consumption of Inequality,
eds. Gail Dines, Robert Jensen and Ann Russo (New York: Routledge, 1997), 35.

11
. Darlene Clark Hine, “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West,”
Signs
14, no. 4 (Summer, 1989): 912.

12
. Lisa Gail Collins,
The Art of History: African American Women Artists Engage the Past
(New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 109.

13
. Patricia Hill Collins,
Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment
(London: Routledge, 1990), 168.

14
. According to Collins, pornography is “ground[ed] in racism and sexism.” For more see Collins, 167. Amoah contends that porn “wreaks particular havoc on black women whose representations in pornography are predicated on not just gender exploitation but “negative racial stereotypes and racialized myths.” For more see Jewel D. Amoah, “Back on the Auction Block: A Discussion of Black Women and Pornography,”
National Black Law Journal
4, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 205.

15
. Tracey A. Gardner, “Racism and the Women’s Movement,” in
Take Back the Night,
ed. Laura Lederer (New York: William and Morrow, 1980), 105.

16
. Because “[t]he history of America is largely one of systematic physical and symbolic exploitation of the Black women’s body,” Teish argues that black women uniquely face the vestiges of such a history in porn. See Luisah Teish, “A Quite Subversion,” in
Take Back The Night: Women on Pornography,
ed. Laura Lederer (New York: William and Morrow, 1980), 155; 117.

17
. Under the pseudonym of Venus Hottentot, Abiola Abrams directed
AfroDite Superstar
(2007), the first film under the
Femme Chocolat
line, executively produced by Candida Royalle. According to Abrams,
AfroDite Superstar
“is about empowering women culturally, politically, emotionally and sexually.” See Jamye Waxman, “Behind the Scenes with
AfroDite Superstar:
An Interview with the Film’s Director, Abiola Abrams,”
Babeland,
accessed October 4, 2010,
http://www.babeland.com/sex-info/feaures/afrodite-superstar-interview
.

18
. Shine Louise Houston is founder of porn production company Pink and White Productions. For more visit her website at
http://pinkwhite.biz/
.

19
. For more see Malindo Lo, “Shine Louise Houston Will Turn You On,”
Curve
16 no. 1, accessed October 6, 2011,
http://backup.curvemag.com/Detailed/711.html
.

20
. See Mireille Miller-Young, “Hip-Hop Honeys and Da Hustlaz: Black Sexualities in the New Hip-Hop Pornography,”
Meridians
8, no. 1 (2008): 261–92, and “Sexy and Smart: Black Women and the Politics of Self-Authorship in Netporn,” in
C’lick Me: A Netporn Studies Reader,
eds. Katrien Jacobs, Marije Janssen and Matteo Pasquinelli,
http://www.networkcultures.org/_uploads/24.pdf
.

21
. Williams explores horror films, melodramas, and pornography as three types of
body genres,
films that have a visceral link to the viewer’s body and produce actual physical responses within it. See Linda Williams, “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre and Excess,”
Film Quarterly
44, no. 4 (1991): 2–13.

22
. Catherine Zuromskis, “Prurient Pictures in Popular Film: The Crisis of Pornographic Representations,”
The Velvet Light Trap,
no. 59 (Spring 2007): 4.

23
. Michele Wallace,
Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory
(New York: Verso, 1990).

24
. Freud’s understanding of polymorphous perversity is useful here as a kind of degenitalization and elaboration of erotic pleasure.

25
. In theorizing the politics of perversion I am relying on the multivalence of the word pervert itself, defined as (verb) “to alter (something) from its original course, meaning, or state to a distortion or corruption of what was first intended; lead (someone) away from what is considered right, natural, or acceptable;” and (noun) “a person whose sexual behavior is regarded as abnormal and unacceptable.” See The New Oxford American Dictionary, 3
^rd
Edition (London: Oxford University Press, 2010), accessed October 15, 2010,
http://www.oxfordreference.com
.

26
. In “Sexual Pleasure as Feminist Choice,” African feminist activist and scholar Patricia McFadden argues for the need to reassert a kind of feminist agency in which “we can embrace women’s erotic power as a political resource in transforming our various social spaces as well as ourselves.” For McFadden such a shift is vital in recognizing “sexuality as something beyond conventional reactionary narratives of efficient reproduction, safe motherhood and defences against disease and violation.” For more see Patricia McFadden, “Sexual Pleasure as Feminist Choice,” in
Feminist Africa
2 (2003), accessed September 27, 2010,
http://www.feministafrica.org/index.php/sexual-pleasure-as-feminist-choice
.

27
. Carole S. Vance, ed.,
Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality
(Boston: Routledge and Kagen Paul, 1984), 1.

Porn: An Effective Vehicle for Sexual Role Modeling and Education

NINA HARTLEY

Nina Hartley
’s rock-solid understanding of the importance of sexual autonomy has fueled her twenty-eight-year career in adult entertainment. As a performer, director, writer, educator, public speaker, and feminist thinker, Hartley has traveled the world delivering her message that sexual freedom is a fundamental human right. She welcomes new social media opportunities for sharing her knowledge and empowering all people, regardless of their orientation. She is the author of
Nina Hartley’s Guide to Total Sex.
Putting to use her degree in nursing, she and her husband, I.S. Levine, have produced the sex-ed video series collectively known as The Nina Hartley Guides, from Adam and Eve, which has sold millions of copies and is currently in its thirty-eighth edition. Still active in front of the camera, she and her husband live in Los Angeles.

W
hen my father discovered what I do for a living he asked, “Why sex? Why not the violin?” I didn’t have an answer for him at that moment. I know now that I’m sexual the way that Mozart was musical. I’m just wired this way and a life of public sexuality has, from my very first time on stage, been as natural to me as breathing. This is true even now, nearly three decades into my career.

When I started in adult entertainment as a dancer in 1983, I didn’t think of myself as any kind of pioneer. I was simply doing what my 1970s San Francisco Bay Area feminist training had told me was my right and duty as a liberated woman: to develop my sexuality as I saw fit. “My body, my rules,” was the credo of the time and, for a nonmonogamous, bisexual exhibitionist with her own ideas about sex, adult entertainment was the only game in town. My goal was never to be a trailblazer, but to carry out my true life’s work: to speak about sex, sexuality, and sexual expression from a place of practice and not just theory, so that I might be helpful to others. A byproduct of that pursuit was my ability to make
a living, which gave me the financial security to be able to devote my life to this work.

By the time I did my first strip tease, I was fully aware of the accomplishments of the women who had come before me, most notably Betty Dodson (all hail), Xaviera Hollander, and the women of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective. Their books—
Liberating Masturbation, The Happy Hooker,
and
Our Bodies, Ourselves
—laid the groundwork for a world in which a woman with an unconventional sexual identity could be happy, whole, and proud, without apology. In time, I connected with the emerging sex-positive community in San Francisco. I became friends with other erotic explorers, including Annie Sprinkle, Carol Queen, Susie Bright, Patrick Califia, Gayle Rubin, Kat Sunlove, Bobby Lilly, and Joanie Blank, whose writings about sexuality and sexual politics (I longed to be a writer but didn’t have the discipline) waged the same battles I did, only on different terrain.

My initial foray into porn came at a particularly opportune time in history, coinciding with a broader public debate over obscenity and a growing awareness of HIV/AIDS, just then being recognized as something other than the “gay plague.” During the early- and mid-1980s (at precisely the time when the home video market took off), differing battle lines around the issue of pornography emerged. One line was drawn within the women’s movement, resulting in a split between the pro- and anticensorship camps, which remains today (the so-called “feminist porn wars”). The other line was drawn by the federal government, then under President Ronald Reagan. Wishing to appease his socially conservative base, he sought to discredit the findings of President Richard Nixon’s 1970 Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, which had found no social harm from explicit material, and which Nixon had immediately repudiated. Reagan convened the Meese Commission on Pornography, which produced the Meese Report: over 1,900 pages of antiporn propaganda that flew off the shelves, making the United States government a best-selling pornographer in its own right. The commission was so obviously partisan that two of its members ultimately resigned rather than sign their names to its findings (though they were antiporn when they joined the commission).