The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (19 page)

I wrote my sexual story, one chapter at a time, in each and every video I’ve made. I’ve used my work in porn to explore many firsts and share those experiences with my fans: sex with a woman, double penetration, group sex, double anal, a blowbang, a gangbang, or my first time with a Japanese woman who didn’t speak English. I’ve let them watch me make love with a real-life partner and fuck complete strangers I had just met moments before the cameras rolled. I’ve even allowed my fans to watch me pregnant, horny, and
Forced to Lactate.

My decision to explore many of my sexual firsts had little to do with my fans who would later watch these videos. Though I was aware that people would likely see my scenes later on, I was naive as to just how big the industry was. To me, I was merely having sex, experimenting with my sexuality, and being recorded while doing so. My fans weren’t a factor until years later. I became more aware of my image when I saw less than flattering images of myself on box covers. I began to be more mindful of wardrobe and hairstyles and started to pick projects based on my ability to work with directors who brought out the best in me rather than how much money I could make.

I’ve raised my own neophyte-feminist, decidedly prochoice, very proud, out, bisexual young teenage daughter, a high-functioning autistic teenage son, and an older daughter in college who is a gun-toting NRA member, currently torn between her previous Republican ideologies and a more liberal way of thinking. When my younger daughter started high school, I explained to her that often teenage boys (and girls) like to use beautiful, intelligent, curvy, sexually curious young women like her to enhance their own sexual exploration and to be cautious not to allow others to write her sexual story.

I am often asked if I would “allow” or “want” my daughter(s) to enter into the porn business or the sex industry as a whole. I’m always torn in answering this question because I feel very strongly that there is absolutely nothing wrong with sex work. As a parent, I would not want any of my children to enter the industry knowing the kind of public ridicule or stigma they would likely face for their decision. I believe that free will extends outside of religion and that as a parent, all I can do is be 100 percent supportive of my children and love them despite their choices. All I can do is exactly as my parents did: prepare my children with the best possible education they can get, give them opportunities to excel in whatever endeavors they pursue, and support their dreams. As parents, we might have our own hopes and dreams for our children, but ultimately, it is for them to decide what path they wish to take. I would certainly give my child(ren) who chose sex work information
on pitfalls (and people) to avoid. I would want them to carve their own path no matter where it takes them. Would I be disappointed if one of them found their way into the sex industry? Perhaps, but I would only hope that they follow my example of balancing work and home, avoid drugs, and not allow themselves to get caught up in the seedier side of the industry.

As I spend more time behind a computer monitor and less time in front of the camera these days, I find myself more and more engaged in the fight for sex worker rights and better sex education than ever before. I am at this stage in my life where I am more conscious of my sociopolitical stance than I ever was in the first eighteen years of my career. Moving forward, would I consider myself and my work to be feminist? Absolutely. Today, I make decisions based on socially conscious thought rather than the fantasy of sexual exploration and the reality of economics. I am far more selective than I was at nineteen in the type of work I choose. I learned to diversify my income streams, which makes it easier to decline work that I feel goes against my core values and political beliefs. I no longer accept work that represents African Americans or black culture in a derogatory light. I am not willing to accept work for less pay merely because another performer is willing to perform for less.

Having spent the last nineteen years—my entire adult life—in the adult film industry, I have learned that my sexual interests are vast and that my intellectual curiosity often seeps into my sensual desires. My personal life has been greatly influenced by my work. The people I’ve met, the news articles I read, the stories that warm or break my heart come from a place of understanding the struggle of sex workers around the world. I find that my political interests include supporting and advocating for sex worker rights based on my own experiences and those of others I’ve encountered. Because I’m a parent, I advocate for comprehensive sex education in schools, particularly in black and brown communities, as I have come to realize that sex education is greatly lacking except for information about the risks of disease and pregnancy. I have come to realize the extreme need for specialized sex education for developmentally delayed teens and adults, as these people have sexual desires that often go overlooked.

I suppose, if I were to label who I am today, I would call myself a black feminist pornographer. Instead of accepting work merely to insure the bills get paid, I purposefully work for directors and companies that portray black female sexuality in ways that I feel are expansive, progressive, and interesting. In my own productions, I strive to show more positive images of black men and women in sexual situations that don’t require
stereotypes to get the point across. I would love to see more pornography without stereotypes about black people, and that instead displays more complexity in the characters and fantasies presented. Every thug in a movie doesn’t have to have a forty ounce bottle of beer in hand. Every curvaceous woman doesn’t have to have booty shorts and bounce her ass as if she’s in a music video. Every black man doesn’t have to refer to himself using the N-word while having sex with a white woman on film. Black and interracial porn movies ignore the diversity in black culture. For some, stereotypical and fetishistic images of black people are part of the fantasy, but I still believe that the porn industry is neglecting a huge marketplace. Where is black porn for black women?

I hate labels. But in trying to answer the question of my own feminism I find myself needing to define my personal truth. I am certainly a sex-positive feminist. My work with sex worker rights advocacy and education, my interest in the decriminalization of prostitution, and my belief that pornography and BDSM are not inherently wrong, come from my own understanding of the importance of women’s ability to claim their sexuality as their own. Yet my sex-positive feminism is not separate from my black feminism. For me it is about agency. My black feminism is about helping women like me to be able to claim their sexuality in the face of decades of mis-education of African American women who were made to believe that they must choose between education, marriage, and family, or sexual freedom. I have come to realize in this phase of my life and career, that I have unknowingly dedicated my experience in social media to showing men and women of color that these are false choices, and that they can be sexual beings, wives, husbands, mothers, and fathers. I want to show people that there is nothing wrong with black love, black sex, and black families. I find that so many black women are afraid of their sexuality—that relinquishing their sexual urges might separate them from God and church and would banish them from everything good and pure . . . the patriarchal image of the hypersexual black female leaves more and more black women on the outside looking in on the sex-positive movement. I want to be a voice for a sex-positive black feminism that is eager to transform pornography into a space where we can have our images and fantasies reflected, too.

Interventions: The Deviant and Defiant Art of Black Women Porn Directors

MIREILLE MILLER-YOUNG

Mireille Miller-Young
is associate professor of feminist studies and affiliate associate professor of black studies, film and media studies, and comparative literature at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research explores race, gender, and sexuality in visual culture, media, and the sex industries in the United States. Her forthcoming book,
A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women, Sex Work, and Pornography,
examines African American women in pornography.

V
anessa Blue decided to become a porn director thanks to her grandparents. “My grandparents had a whole room dedicated to smut,” she explained. “Smut and two Lazy Boys.”
¹
I had gone to visit Vanessa in her Woodland Hills condo to talk to the performer-turned-director and webmistress about her life and latest work.
²
She told me about how she grew up with porn in her home, so it was in no way a foreign concept to her. In fact, when she began to perform in the late 1990s, it was her grandparents in Nebraska who found out first. “I’m looking at this movie
Dirty Debutantes #61,
and that sure does look like you,” she recalled her grandmother saying, hilariously exaggerating her aged voice on the phone. “After that first scene and everybody found out, I was like fuck it. I might as well finish what I started,” Vanessa explained, shrugging her shoulders.

“But what exactly drove you to start making your own porn, not just acting in it?” I asked. “I always loved porn and I always wanted to make it and to be a part of it,” Vanessa asserted. “I liked watching people be free and enjoy themselves, and I liked shooting it. I always wanted to be behind the camera . . . [I thought] Let me see if I can become the director.” For Vanessa, being confronted by her grandmother about working as a porn actress forced her to think about what she really wanted. Her family did not celebrate her work in the sex industry but they understood it. What her family really wanted was for her to control her labor, rather than be controlled by someone else. If the sex industry offered
that opportunity, then she should take it. Her grandparents sternly told her: “We are not saying it is wrong that you do porn, it’s not. Just don’t let these people fuck you. Don’t stay there getting fucked. Figure out a way to make money off of it if that’s what you like.”

After many stops and starts, Vanessa Blue took her grandparents’ advice and taught herself filmmaking and web design. She built her own editing studio from her earnings as a porn actress, exotic dancer, phone sex worker, fetish model, dominatrix, and private escort. She has directed over twenty hardcore videos and dozens of digital short films, which are distributed by major companies like Adam and Eve, Hustler, and Evil Angel’s Justin Slayer International. She also distributes them herself through her suite of members-only websites and privately owned video hosting sites like
Clips4Sale.com
. Though working to make a living outside of the corporate adult-entertainment industry’s influence, she remains very much tied to it. Vanessa is a compelling example of the possibilities and limits of pornography as a space where black women vie to gain greater control over their labor but are nonetheless cleaved to the industry’s inexorable capitalistic apparatus.

For Vanessa, control doesn’t just mean achieving independence from porn producers who make a great deal of money off of her work as a performer while also treating her as a disposable working body; it means being able to decide when, where, and how she wants to employ her labor. It means avoiding unethical directors and producers who create exploitative and unsafe work environments, and treat her with little care, interest, or respect. There is a less tangible aspect to gaining control over the means of production in porn work as well: authorship. To create the terms of one’s own performance and to catalyze one’s own fantasies into the sex scene—these dimensions of a more autonomous sexual labor allow Vanessa to see herself as much more empowered behind the camera.

Moving behind the camera, then, is a kind of mobility that allows sex workers greater agency to traverse the barriers placed around them in the porn business. By highlighting this maneuver we can reveal the material factors that tend to restrict and bind the movement of sex workers, as well as the material forces that might facilitate their ability to claim a role in the means of production.
³
Scholarship on feminist pornography, which is notably an emerging field based on an emergent genre and practice, tends to focus on pornographic media texts that are produced and consumed in ways that push against or subvert gender and sexual normativity; are designed by and for women, transgender or genderqueer and queer people; and that destabilize the established
binary model of female objectifcation for male viewing pleasure. Yet this vibrant movement to make new and different kinds of porn imbued with feminist politics, which began in the 1980s and blossomed in the 2000s, is not separate from the marketplace or from the politics of sexual labor.

Feminist pornography is a for-profit enterprise that relies upon sex workers to manufacture its subversive fantasies and build its consumer base. And like mainstream (heterosexual) pornography, its structure, networks, and modes of representation are regulated and sanctioned by the State, dependent on access to new media technologies, and embedded in the flows of global capital. Though feminism seeks to dismantle structural and discursive exploitation and oppression of women and marginalized populations, our feminist praxis is not external to or untouched by hegemonic systems of domination. Theorizing a feminist pornography then means thinking about a dual process of transgression and restriction, for both representation and labor.