The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (15 page)

7
. Mark O’Keefe, “Women Account for Hefty Portion of Web Porn Viewing,” Newhouse News Service, October 31, 2003,
http://www.newhouse.com/archive/okeefe103103.html
(page on site discontinued).

8
. Adele Horin, “One in Three Porn Viewers are Women,”
Sydney Morning Herald,
May 26, 2007,
http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/one-in-three-porn-viewers-are-women/2007/05/25/1179601669066.html
.

9
. Quoted in Violet Blue, “Are More Women OK With Watching Porn?,” CNN, July 24, 2009,
http://articles.cnn.com/2009-07-24/living/o.women.watching.porn_1_arousal-candida-royalle-explicit-sexual-imagery?_s=PM:LIVING
. Note: The original Nielsen NetRatings reports have been removed from the NetRatings site. Nielsen is now reluctant to associate itself with figures relating to adult sites. However I did receive an assurance from a Nielsen spokesperson that the statistics are accurate.

From Text to Context: Feminist Porn and the Making of a Market

LYNN COMELLA

Lynn Comella
is a women’s studies professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she teaches courses on gender, sexuality, media, and popular culture. Her research focuses primarily on the adult entertainment industry, and the history of the women’s market for sex toys and pornography. Her work has been published in
Feminist Media Studies, The Communication Review,
and
Contexts,
and appears in
Sex for Sale: Prostitution, Pornography, and the Sex Industry
(2nd edition),
New Sociologies of Sex Work,
and
Commodity Activism: Cultural Resistance in Neoliberal Times.
She is a frequent media contributor, and writes a popular monthly column on sexuality and culture for
Las Vegas Weekly.

Introduction

For six months in 2001 I worked on the sales floor at the feminist sex-toy retailer Babeland’s Lower East Side store in New York City.
¹
My daily tasks included everything from restocking vibrators to ringing up sales to talking with customers—young and old, male and female, straight and queer—about the G-spot, the P-spot, and everything in between. Hands down, my favorite part of the job was helping novice porn consumers navigate the store’s expansive collection of porn. On a regular basis, customers asked: Do you carry porn for women? Porn with a plot? Couples porn? Lesbian porn? Something I can take home to my girlfriend, boyfriend, wife, or husband? For some, figuring out where to begin was a daunting prospect. Many welcomed a little hand-holding and guidance along the way, and I was more than happy to supply it.

Babeland’s porn collection was housed in a smart-looking display case at the back of the store. Unlike more traditional sex stores, where shelves of porn tend to dominate the inventory, at Babeland, if you weren’t specifically shopping for porn you might never notice it. The bulk of the video library was discretely displayed in three-ringed binders organized by genre—heterosexual, LGBT, instructional, and classic
porn. Each binder contained clear plastic sleeves with a flattened video box cover slipped inside, and brief yet detailed video reviews written by Babeland staff.

Staff members at Babeland had spent a considerable amount of time and energy curating the store’s porn collection. They had waded through catalogs with hundreds of porn titles to pick the ones that best fit the business’s sex positive ethos and commitment to quality. They did their best to find porn with high production values, as well as porn made by companies with reputations for treating their actors well and compensating them fairly. Babeland took pride in offering its customers a mix of titles that weren’t readily available at other stores in the city.

Babeland’s porn collection was nothing if not eclectic. You could find porn made by some of the biggest and most profitable porn companies in the San Fernando Valley, such as Wicked and Vivid, sitting alongside porn by small lesbian-run production companies in San Francisco that had maxed out their credit cards to fund their projects. There were titles from porn’s “golden age,” such as
Debbie Does Dallas, The Opening of Misty Beethoven,
and
Café Flesh,
and a variety of how-to videos, including
How to Female Ejaculate, Bend Over Boyfriend,
and
Selfloving.
Babeland’s porn buyer was committed to carrying titles that reflected the company’s mission to promote sexual vitality and education, encourage personal empowerment, and support a more passionate world for all. And the more examples she could find that featured female pleasure and genuine orgasms, the better.

A great deal of research on pornography focuses on the pornographic text as the primary site of analysis. Far less attention has been paid by researchers to the broader cultural matrix in which porn texts circulate. With the advent of the VCR, video technology, and desktop publishing in the early 1980s, feminists had access to affordable means of production, which they used to create new kinds of sexual imagery for straight women, lesbians, queers, and couples. Yet getting feminist porn into the hands of consumers required much more than simply making it; it demanded new modes of marketing and distribution that could reach previously marginalized groups. Enter the feminist sex-toy store.

Babeland is part of a much larger network of sex-positive retailers whose raison d’être is providing customers—especially women—with quality products and accurate information in warm and welcoming retail environments. These stores are carefully designed to maximize the comfort level of even the most tentative shopper while simultaneously mitigating the “ick” factor commonly associated with conventional adult stores.
²
From Eve’s Garden in New York City and Good Vibrations in San
Francisco to Self Serve in Albuquerque and Sugar in Baltimore, these, and similar businesses, have carved out a niche in the sexual marketplace by turning the prevailing logic of the adult industry on its head. Their primary focus is women rather than men; sexual openness not shame; sex positivity instead of negativity; and sex education as opposed to straight up titillation. Collectively, these businesses form what Claire Cavanah, co-founder of Babeland, describes as the “alternative sex-vending movement,” one committed to changing the cultural conversations about sex and pleasure.
³

Good Vibrations and its sister stores have also served as launching pads for a number of sex-positive writers, sex-toy manufacturers, and pornographers who have gone on to leave their own sex-positive stamps on the world: Susie Bright was working at Good Vibrations when she began writing her column for
Penthouse Forum;
former Good Vibrations employee Marilyn Bishara started Vixen Creations, a silicone dildo company, in 1992 when she was working as a computer programmer at the store (Good Vibrations had experienced trouble getting consistent delivery on its silicone products, and Bishara, who realized she could do better, branched out on her own); Jackie Strano and Shar Rednour, the creative forces behind SIR Video, a lesbian porn production company, spent many years working at Good Vibrations, which is where the inspiration for their popular
Bend Over Boyfriend
series of instructional videos was conceived. The list of feminist entrepreneurs and cultural producers who sharpened their sex-positive chops while working on the sales floor at women-owned sex-toy stores, is a long and impressive one.

In mapping the analytic shift from porn text to context, I utilize a cultural studies approach that is committed to what communication scholar Larry Grossberg describes as a “radical contextualism,” one that “precludes defining culture, or the relations between culture and power, outside of the particular context into which cultural studies imagines itself to intervene.”
⁴
In other words, the identity and effects of feminist pornography, as both a discursive intervention and form of cultural critique, do not exist apart from the larger sex-positive commercial context in which it resides. Within this recalibrated critical framework, the study of producers, texts, and audiences is not an end in itself, but becomes “the material with which cultural studies must grapple in its attempt to understand specific contextual relations of culture and power.”
⁵

This essay draws on a decade’s worth of research on feminist sex-toy businesses in the United States in order to examine the broader context of sex positive cultural production, distribution, and retail—including new ways of talking about pornography, which helped create a viable market
for feminist porn.
⁶
Over the past thirty years, sex-positive entrepreneurs, including feminist porn producers and retailers, have cultivated what I describe as a form of “sex-positive synergy” that links different enterprises together through a shared vision of changing the way the culture thinks and talks about sex. An important part of this synergy is the customer “feedback loop,” which has enabled a number of feminist and queer pornographers to take what they learned while working on the sales floor at feminist sex-toy stores and parlay this information back into the world of porn. “Sex-positive synergy” is a key component in understanding the larger marketplace dynamic that has shaped feminist porn as both a form of sexual entertainment and cultural critique.

The analytic shift from porn text to context is also a political intervention intended to challenge the essentialist and reductionist arguments about pornography that are frequently mobilized by antipornography feminists in an effort to discount feminist porn as a valid form of cultural critique. Sex-positive feminists—those who make, watch, study, and write about pornography—are frequently accused by antipornography feminists of lacking any meaningful critique of the mainstream porn industry. And while antiporn feminists may occasionally acknowledge porn made by and for women, they typically do so only in passing before dismissing it as irrelevant. The reasons for this vary, but include the stance that pornography geared toward women comprises such a small segment of a much larger industry that its effects are virtually negligible, or that porn for women apes, rather than challenges, the dominant codes and conventions used by mainstream pornographers whose sole motivation, according to this narrative, is profit. The notion of “sex-positive synergy” challenges these arguments.

New Texts, Fresh Contexts

It’s impossible to talk about the history of feminist porn in the United States without talking about Candida Royalle. A former adult entertainer, Royalle founded her own porn production company, Femme Productions, in 1984, and was one of the first women to imagine a viewing audience for pornography that went beyond the idealized male consumer. Royalle started her company with three goals in mind: she wanted to demonstrate it was possible to create porn that had integrity; to show that porn could be nonsexist; and to make people feel good about their sexuality. “I wanted to make films that say we all have a right to pleasure, and that women, especially, have a right to our own pleasure.”
⁷

Because Royalle had consciously rejected many of the clichés and
conventions associated with mainstream pornography, her films were virtually unrecognizable to most middle-of-the-road porn distributors and storeowners. She encountered more than a few raised eyebrows and skeptical responses from people who either did not know how to market her films, or, more significantly, were unconvinced they would sell. According to Royalle:

I had to set out to prove that there was a market demand for adult movies that spoke about sex positively, made [women] feel good about our sexuality, and that presented a woman’s voice. And [I wanted them to be] something of quality and integrity that couples could share. I was convinced that there was a demand for this and I was told that there wasn’t when I started. Women were not interested. There was no such thing as a couples’ market and that’s all there was to it.
⁹

For Royalle, the issue of distribution was particularly challenging, especially in the early 1980s, when the “women’s market” for sexually oriented products existed almost entirely on the fringes of the adult entertainment industry. “I knew that what I had to do was get consumers to go into the stores and demand my products,” she said. According to Royalle, retailers like Good Vibrations, along with Eve’s Garden, were some of the first businesses “to open their doors to the idea that women wanted their own products and things aimed at them . . . knowing that there was already this tiny little [space] carved out where I could place my stuff gave me encouragement. And the fact that they showed support, that they carried my products, spoke well of them, and reviewed them highly was very important.
I think we really work hand in hand
” [emphasis mine].
¹⁰