The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (16 page)

Good Vibrations offered a retail context that was well-suited to the kinds of films Royalle was making. The company was founded in 1977 by sex therapist and educator Joani Blank, and, throughout the 1970s and 80s, everything about its women-centered and educational focus was novel. Blank’s goal from the start was to provide women “especially but not exclusively” access to a clean and well-lit sex-toy store, one that defied the stereotype of adult businesses as inherently seedy and inhospitable. Good Vibrations was, by design, the antithesis of the kind of adult store one might expect to find in the red light district of a typical US city. It was a highly gender-coded environment where women could buy their vibrators, talk about sex, and feel supported around their sexuality at a time when there were few places to do so. It wasn’t long until Good Vibrations’ unique approach to selling sex toys and talking about
sex became a model for other retailers interested in opening sex-positive stores in their own communities. The Good Vibrations model of sex retailing proliferated and, with it, the business’s mission of sex positivity and social change.

One of the ways that Blank differentiated Good Vibrations from more stereotypically “lurid” adult stores was that she initially did not carry pornography. Blank was personally “not into videos”; but more than that, she felt that selling porn undercut the alternative retail vibe that she and her staff were trying to cultivate. Her attitude about pornography slowly began to change when she hired Susie Bright to work on the sales floor at Good Vibrations in the early eighties. Bright was a sex-positive powerhouse whose imagination was “completely captured” by Blank’s vision for Good Vibrations. By the mid-1980s, Bright was working as a writer at
On Our Backs,
and she had also started to pen a regular column on pornography for
Penthouse Forum.
Bright’s interest and knowledge about pornography soon found its way to Good Vibrations. She felt that it was important for Good Vibrations’ customers to have access to a video rental library. “VHS was exploding,” she told me. “Movies are like stories. They are just like books. It’s education; it’s entertainment. I thought of Good Vibrations as being part of the cultural conversation and expansion around sex, so not having movies was sort of like saying we don’t use forks.”
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But Bright had to first convince Blank that carrying a carefully selected library of porn videos was not inherently antithetical to the store’s women-centered, sex-positive mission. She did this not by generating an argument about potential sales or profitability—which in time became significant—but by convincing Blank in political terms that it was valuable for Good Vibrations’ customers to have access to the world of fantasy and desire that porn offered. “I felt this was a fascinating world, and I was sick of women being kept out. I wanted everyone to know what I knew. And I knew that everybody wanted to peek.”
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Bright and Blank initially shared some of the same reservations about having a video library, and they talked about how they might remedy these concerns to make the collection as accessible to as many people as possible while still fitting with the store’s sex-positive, women-friendly mission. As Bright recounted:

[Joani] was like, ‘You know what I hate? Those awful box covers.’ And I was like, ‘I know. They suck.’ They are misleading and cheesy and just the kind of thing to make our customers run screaming into the night. I said that we just won’t have them. We will write our own descriptions for movies, and we will take the black VHS tape and just put it in a blank box. This way, everybody will be watching things based on what we say about it, and they won’t see this stupid, pouty girl in a bikini with her tongue sticking out that has no relationship to what the movie is about. That was her biggest concern. She didn’t know anything about the content of porn and what it was like. It was also a concern of mine, because I felt like those covers were misleading, and part of the crap production values that made so many women turn away from porn.
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In 1989 Good Vibrations took the plunge and began carrying a small collection of pornography, which Bright had carefully screened and selected. The collection was small, containing less than twenty titles.
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As former Good Vibrations staff member Roma Estevez, who eventually took over the porn buying and reviewing responsibilities after Bright left the company, recounted:

The video collection was controversial at first, but Susie slowly began to convince reluctant customers of the benefits of erotic film. In Susie’s mind, porn was a vehicle, much like erotic literature or paintings, which, like sex toys, could enhance one’s sexual experiences. Soon, her collection of favorites became acceptable to customers, and then, very popular. Good Vibrations was a very different place to rent pornography. Certainly there were other venues in the city to rent such films, but they lacked the charm and the ‘clean, well-lighted’ atmosphere that was Good Vibrations.
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Good Vibrations was one of the first businesses to provide customers with a warm and inviting place where they could browse for porn. But it also offered customers more than just soft lighting and comfy chairs; it gave them permission to look at images that, for many people, had previously been off-limits, and armed them with information about directors, actors, and genres intended to increase their porn literacy. As Cathy Winks writes in the
Good Vibrations Guide to Adult Videos:

It didn’t take long for us to realize that we were providing a completely unique service for a grateful and enthusiastic audience. Good Vibrations was in the right place at the right time to represent the erotic tastes of consumers largely ignored by the mainstream adult industry: women, male/female couples and lesbians. Whether our customers were novices with next to no prior exposure to porn, or experienced “connoisseurs,” they appreciated our efforts to sift through the thousands of erotic videos released every year in search of the cream of the crop.
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The experiences of Candida Royalle, and her quest for distributors and retail outlets that would carry her movies, and Susie Bright, who recognized the ways that pornography fit with Good Vibrations’ sex-positive mission, force us to enlarge the scope of our analyses to include the wider cultural and commercial contexts that enable feminist texts to circulate. In other words, feminist cultural production, including pornography, involves much more than just making texts; it also involves making sex-positive
contexts
and creating favorable conditions of reception.

Sex Education and Synergy

Sex education has been a staple of the Good Vibrations model of retailing since its inception. Indeed, one of the most important ways that Good Vibrations and its sister stores have differentiated themselves from more conventional adult businesses is that they have traditionally led with sex education rather than profit for profit’s sake—an approach that, throughout the years, has certainly presented its own unique set of challenges. By and large, sex-positive retailers see their businesses as a way to provide customers with a much needed service, one of sexual education, empowerment, and personal transformation. A Good Vibrations employee summed it up this way: “I think our mission is not just about profits, or selling sex toys for the money, it’s about selling sex toys as a vehicle to get accurate information out there and change people’s attitudes about sex.”
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But it’s not just sex toys that serve as conversation starters and vehicles for disseminating accurate information about sex. A number of people, from filmmakers to scholars, have recognized the potential for pornography to serve as a medium for sex education. Robert Eberwein’s comprehensive history of sex education in film and video demonstrates that since the early part of the twentieth century the technology of moving images was used as a tool for dispensing information about sex, from films about venereal disease in the early twentieth century, to safer sex education films in the 1980s, to Betty Dodson’s videos about female sexual pleasure in the 1990s.
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For some sex educators, including feminist author and porn director Tristan Taormino, working on the sales floor at a feminist sex toy store was an opportunity to tap into the sexual psyche of the typical American sexual consumer. As Taormino writes in the introduction to her book
Down and Dirty Sex Secrets:

Every day I worked [at Babeland], dozens of ordinary folks walked through the door looking for what we had inside. Their searches almost always began with a question. Most of them were complete strangers, and yet they told me things that were extremely personal and deeply intimate. Their revelations were sometimes moving, sometimes surprising, and always fascinating.
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For Taormino, an upshot of working at a place like Babeland was that she had direct contact with customers. She was able to hear straight from them, unfiltered, which aspects of human sexuality most interested them and piqued their curiosity. More often than not, her interactions with customers on the sales floor left her feeling like a sex therapist, someone who was uniquely positioned to help people have better and more fulfilling sex lives.

Feeling like a therapist wasn’t an entirely new experience for Taormino. By the time she started working at Babeland she had already written her first book,
The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women
and had toured the country promoting it. “I knew this was a book that I needed to write, and that it would appeal to men and women. I knew that I wasn’t the only one who was desperately searching for good information on anal sex,” she told me in an interview years ago.
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She also realized that book’s subject—a how-to guide about anal sex for women—“did not exactly lend itself to the traditional book reading” at a place like Barnes & Noble. “Most bookstores weren’t clamoring to create a huge poster of the cover, put it in the window, and announce a book signing by me. It was no
Chicken Soup for your Ass,
even if I thought it was.”
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Instead, Taormino had to find creative ways to promote the book, and feminist sex-toy stores seemed like a logical place to find a receptive audience.

Taormino taught workshops on anal sex at sex-toy stores across the country as a way to promote her book. During her tour, people began asking when she was going to turn the
Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women
into an instructional sex video. The following year, in 1999, she teamed up with John Stagliano from Evil Angel and produced her first adult film, an instructional sex video based on her award-winning book.

It’s likely that Taormino would have eventually turned the
Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women
into a sexually explicit video without the encouragement of fans. But the positive feedback she received from people who had attended her workshops—her potential audience, in fact—was a barometer that allowed her to gauge the level of interest for the video, even before the project was off the ground. According to Taormino:

People were asking me about a video—and I’ve always been a big cheerleader for porn. I had been doing a lot of different sex workshops, and working at Babeland, and I felt like I wanted to make this video. My purpose with the video—which I say in it—is that I not only want to teach people how to have safe, pleasurable anal sex, but I want to inspire them to run out and do it.
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Taormino’s experience promoting her book, and, in turn, making her first movie, is instructive for what it suggests not only about the larger context of sex-positive feminist cultural production, but the importance of the customer “feedback loop.” Working at Babeland and conducting workshops across the country allowed Taormino to take the pulse of a subset of the American sexual marketplace. Rather than groping in the dark, the almost daily conversations she had about sex with people of all genders, ages, and sexual orientations, from many corners to the country, became resources for future books and films that were tailored, to some extent, around the kinds of things that Taormino’s target audience said were gaps in the marketplace of sexual information and imagery.

Shar Rednour and Jackie Strano had a similar experience with their first film,
Bend Over Boyfriend,
which they co-produced with Fatale Video, an established lesbian porn production company in San Francisco.
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Rednour had previously worked as the managing editor of
On Our Backs
magazine and had worked on several different shoots for Fatale Video; Strano, meanwhile, was working on the sales floor at Good Vibrations. By the late 1990s, the two realized that interest in anal sex, particularly from women who wanted to anally penetrate their male partners, was growing. “Everybody I knew, all the straight girls and all the bi girls, [wanted to do it], and everybody [who was] coming into the store wanting strap-on-dildos and wanting to know how to do it to their boyfriend or husband. It just seemed like all of the sudden people were talking about it,” Strano recounted.
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At the time, there was virtually no reliable information on the subject, and the two knew that this was the film they needed to make.

Rednour and Strano were confident that if women were coming into Good Vibrations in San Francisco—an admittedly slightly skewed sample—with interest in learning more about bending over their boyfriends, then it was only a matter of time before women across the country would ask how they, too, could be in the driver’s seat. As Rednour explained: “We knew if there were twenty people that we had waited on [at Good Vibrations], then that was the crest of the wave that was going to be coming if you just gave it a little bit of a push.”
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They decided there was
no better way to widely disseminate accurate and safe information to couples interested in exploring male anal play than to package this information in the form of an instructional sex video that could be both sexy and educational at the same time.