The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (44 page)

It would be unfortunate if that slightly too-perfect vision of what sex could be were lost. Piracy and the Internet have severely diminished the profitability of traditional business models, while also creating access for other viewpoints. On the upside, previously marginalized people now have access to the means of production. Rather than being treated as some kind of freak show, pierced, tattooed, disabled, queer, and trans folk can now make movies that speak to their sensibilities and create communities that support and foster them and their sexual visions.

More than ever, small companies are popping up around the country, dedicated to making movies that don’t necessarily cater only to the sexual tastes of heterosexual men and that strive to treat the performers well and respectfully. Rather than having to look through dozens of “straight” porn movies hoping to find one scene that sort of works for them, queer folk now have access to entire movies, websites, and magazines containing nothing but what they like to see, just like the straight folk. And for that, credit has to be given to the more conventional porn that came before for opening the way to alternative visions of sexuality. It’s been both individually and socially educational in that regard.

People often ask, “Where do you see porn in ten years?” I really don’t have a clue, with technology changing so quickly. That said, we’ve pretty much come to the end of “circus sex,” the X-rated equivalent of
Jackass.
There are a finite number of orifices in a human body, and only so many things that can be stuck into them, and those options have been pretty much played out ad nausem. That leaves the realm of feelings and emotions, which have no limit and no end. So, if I were to predict anything I’d
predict a focus on capturing authentic feeling on camera, be it romantic, animalistic, or something in between.

Of one thing I’m certain. Pornography has always been with us and in whatever form, it always will be. Those who imagine a world without porn as some kind of utopia are actually imagining a world in which there is no room for sexual dreaming, or sexual learning, but rather a prescribed definition of “wholesome” sexuality from which the erotic imagination, woolly as it sometimes is, has been leached. I would not want to live in such a world and I don’t think most of us—if being honest with ourselves—would, either.

I picture my work as a sex educator continuing long after my career as a sex performer has become more a hobby than an occupation. I expect to continue delivering the good news I brought with me when I came in. It’s a simple enough message, but so important to a happy life: sex is good for you and the more you know about it, the better it’s likely to be.

From “It Could Happen to Someone You Love” to “Do You Speak Ass?”: Women and Discourses of Sex Education in Erotic Film and Video

KEVIN HEFFERNAN

Kevin Heffernan
teaches media culture and history in the Division of Film and Media Arts at Southern Methodist University.
Divine Trash,
a documentary on the early career of John Waters on which Heffernan served as associate producer and co-screenwriter, won the Filmmakers’ Trophy in Documentary at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival. He is the author of
Ghouls, Gimmicks and Gold: Horror Films and the American Movie Business, 1952–1968
from Duke University Press and co-author, with Frances Milstead and Steve Yeager, of
My Son Divine
from Alyson Publications. He is writing a book on contemporary East Asian cinema tentatively titled
A Wind From the East
and another book tentatively titled
From
Beavis and Butt Head
to the Tea Baggers: Dumb White Guy Politics and Culture in America.

I
n June 2012, the Michigan House of Representatives had just passed a bill implementing sweeping new regulations on providers of abortion services and was debating a bill that would, if passed, have banned all abortions in the state after twenty weeks with almost non-existent exemptions for the life of the pregnant woman. During the floor debate, West Bloomfield Democratic Representative Lisa Brown ended her speech against the proposed law with the words, “Finally, Mr. Speaker, I’m flattered that you’re all so interested in my vagina, but ‘no’ means ‘no.’” Responses of histrionic outrage from her male colleagues who had supported the bill were swift and shrill. “What she said was offensive,” said Rep. Mike Callton, a Republican from Nashville. “It was so offensive, I don’t even want to say it in front of women. I would not say that in mixed company.” House Republicans then banned Brown and a Democratic colleague, Representative Barb Byrum from Onandaga, from speaking on the floor the following day during debate on a bill concerning school system retirees. At a press conference held while her colleagues were debating the retiree bill, Brown asked, “If I can’t say the word vagina, why are we legislating vaginas? What language should I use?”
¹
Brown’s assertion
of ownership by using the first-person possessive and her mocking conflation of the twin male impulses of sexual interest in and patriarchal control of women’s reproductive systems was enough to impart a jolt of unspeakable pornographic obscenity to even the most medicalized vocabulary pertaining to female reproductive anatomy.

This male squeamishness was, of course, nothing new. The nineteenth-century professionalization of medicine, particularly the field of gynecology, occurred at the same time that reformers such as Anthony Comstock were passing laws criminalizing unauthorized images and information about sex, pregnancy, and the body, which they saw everywhere after inexpensive, mass-produced books and pamphlets became commonplace. This ambivalence continued for the first three quarters of the twentieth century, as medical and educational discourses were used to both condemn and defend publically exhibited motion pictures, some of which featured images forbidden by the institution of Hollywood, from the “classical” exploitation films of the 1930s and 1940s to the dawn of hardcore cinema at the close of the 1960s.

Recently, the niche marketing of home video has made possible the appearance of sexually explicit educational materials completely created by women and distributed online and on home video by the same commercial industry that produces and distributes pornographic videos and sex toys, all seemingly without religious, medical, or juridical vetting by middle-aged white males. For some, this is yet another onslaught of dirty pictures seeking the legal and cultural cover of educational value and social importance. The series of videos from long-time contraceptive and sex-toy supplier Adam and Eve produced by and starring porn actress Nina Hartley and a later-introduced line of how-to videos produced by author and sex educator Tristan Taormino do in fact share a wide range of aesthetic and discursive features with both exploitation films going back many decades and contemporary commercial porn. However, each of these series dispenses in its own way with the patriarchal voice of medical authority characteristic of earlier modes. In addition, many installments in the Hartley and Taormino series move the emphasis away from the genitals to a more whole-body sexual response; finally, both Hartley and Taormino attempt to portray active sexuality as a lived inner experience, unique to each woman, rather than as a discrete observable moment captured on video for the camera and, later, the detached viewer. The tension between these innovative approaches and the visual and commercial undertow of more conventional porn is a mark of their engagement with and intervention in changing discourses of sexuality.

Censorship and the Gestation of Gynecology

In America, the relationship between images and discourses on the female body circulated for educational and therapeutic purposes and those circulated for the purpose of titillation is as intimate, tortured, and dysfunctional, as is any relationship characterized by common parentage and close family resemblance. This relationship reached an unsustainable level of conflict in the years following the Civil War. While Americans endured the wrenching changes to the economy as its emphasis shifted from agriculture to manufacturing, a decades-long relocation of population centers from rural areas resulted in massive cultural displacement: large numbers of young men moved into densely populated cities and were exposed to mass-produced forms of popular entertainment such as paperback books, mass-circulation magazines, flyers, and pamphlets, all made possible by economies of scale in production and distribution as vulcanized rubber was revolutionizing transportation and streamlining the printing process, not to mention reducing the manufacturing cost of latex condoms. Several cultural and religious groups attempted to circumvent the seismic shifts that these changes threatened to bring, including the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) which, in 1866, sent a contingent to Albany, New York, to lobby for the suppression of obscene and licentious books and literature. In the years that followed, YMCA crusader and reformer Anthony Comstock would form the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and successfully lobby Congress in 1873 to bring to bear federal powers to oversee the postal service and levy tariffs to bear on literature he saw as corrupting of youth. The so-called “Comstock Law” made it a felony to import or send through the mails any sexual imagery, sexual accounts, or information on birth control and abortion, because of their perceived tendency to incite and corrupt. The law survived an 1896 challenge in the case of
Rosen v. US,
which cited the precedent of English common law upholding the government’s ability to censor material that would tend “to deprave or corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences.”
²

One of Comstock’s most powerful allies was the American Medical Association, which since its inception in 1847 was stepping up efforts to destroy the centuries-old tradition of midwifery and replace it with the professionalized disciplines of obstetrics and gynecology, both of which actively suppressed access and information about contraception and abortifacents. During this period, anatomy and medical textbooks were seized, restrained, and re-edited to comply with the strictures upheld in the Rosen decision.
³
These cultural conflicts and the aforementioned
technological innovations in printing made rapid modernization of the art of medical illustration necessary. A key figure in this modernization was the German artist and illustrator Max Brödel (1870–1941), who emigrated from Leipzig to the US in 1894, where he began working with the first professor of gynecology at the medical school at Johns Hopkins University, Howard Atwood Kelly (1858–1943). In 1898, the first volume of Kelly’s textbook,
Operative Gynecology,
was published and featured over one hundred and fifty illustrations by Brödel. This volume and its successor established Kelly as the premiere gynecologist in the United States,
⁴
and his work continued to feature the highly detailed and elegant illustrations of Brödel, whose innovations in pen-and-ink technique enabled the volumes’ printers to replicate luxurious and meticulously rendered half tones and textures.
⁵
Brödel’s 1909 illustration of an open-air cystoscopy (an early endoscopic technique for seeing inside the bladder after distending it with air) features a powerful, chiseled profile of Dr. Kelly himself bringing the power of technology and masculine vision to bear on a cutaway side view of a female body.

The light source from the left is both functional, illustrating its role in indirect illumination of the subject through Kelly’s physician reflector, and symbolic, adding to the heroic, even hagiographic view of Kelly, which in fact became his role in the history of his profession, as Brödel’s would be in medical illustration.
⁶
One hundred years later, it is no surprise to either feminists or pornographers that during this earlier time that sought to control women’s bodies and men’s access to information about and images of them, the first major modern innovations in medical illustration reached critical mass in the field of gynecology.

Sex(ploitation) Ed: White Coats and “False Modesty” on the Movie Screen

Just as the displacements following the Civil War were conflated and confused with the social effects of the rising popular medium of print, the immense social changes in the decades after World War I were attributed by critics and reformers of the time to the increasingly popular medium of motion pictures, and many of these reformers called for strict rules regarding their content. Since widespread municipal and state censorship of motion pictures would have been disastrous for the American film industry’s system of carefully scheduled national distribution of their product, throughout Hollywood’s studio era from the 1920s until the 1960s, the most powerful players in the American movie business exercised control over the scripts and release prints of any films distributed
by the major studios through the Production Code Administration of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. This self-policing by the PCA was a crucial part of “Hollywood” as a cultural institution based on an ideology of “entertainment” films made with high production values and major stars that became the lingua franca of American popular culture from the 1920s until the rise of television after World War II.