The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (23 page)

In addition to mainstream porn, I was exposed to images of some of the scions of feminist pornography including Annie Sprinkle and Nina Hartley. I watched Nina Hartley’s films and felt admiration for her clear and frank way of talking about sex. I loved that she was completely present and aware of herself and her presentation. The films Nina, Annie, and others made represented a sexuality that was open, honest, and without shame; they showcased sex that was fun and consensual. They had a sexual agency that I found arousing. It was the first time that I saw sex that resonated with me and that I wanted to emulate. Even with these films though, I still had issues with the bodies: the differences between theirs and mine. I couldn’t relate to the curvaceous body type of Nina Hartley or Annie Sprinkle. At five-feet-ten and 145 pounds, I have been athletic and sinewy for most of my adult life. My breasts are small A cups, and my look is often more androgynous than girly. Like many women, I experienced the simultaneous intrigue and revulsion that can
accompany pornographic film watching
³
: of being simultaneously captivated and repulsed by the performers as they embody stereotypical female “beauty” and “perfection.”

While I was slowly constructing my own ideas about what porn should be, I discussed my thoughts with my sex-wise coworkers at Good Vibrations. One coworker in particular, Shine Louise Houston, was always available and interested in my thoughts on porn, as she had some pretty exciting thoughts of her own. When I talked about the kind of porn I wanted to
see,
she talked about the kind of porn she wanted to
make.
She talked with fervor about what she thought was hot and erotic and what her films would look like. Her dream was to direct sex scenes that were “authentic,” a term that we discussed quite a bit. I was taken with her dream and with her enthusiasm but also the fluidity of her ideas: forward thinking, diverse, and edgy, like mine. On a work break one day, I offhandedly said that should her dream ever come to fruition, I would star in her first film. I meant it, though I doubted that I would ever have to make good on such a promise. She left her job at the sex shop soon after that conversation. Over the course of the next year, I only heard about her in passing from mutual friends. Then I got a phone call from Shine. As it turned out, during that year, she was working on manifesting the adult film empire that would ultimately change my life.

She asked me if I was ready to star in her film. She had gotten money together to finance her first movie and was I still interested? Yes, I was. And I was terribly curious. I spent the next two months preparing myself as best I could for what I imagined I would experience. To say I was nervous would be a huge understatement: when I walked in the door to the San Francisco apartment that was serving as the set, I was shaking all over. I had tweezed, primped, self-tanned and done just about everything I could to feel good naked. Though I knew I was there to be myself and give good, hot sex, I still feared that I wasn’t “porn” enough and couldn’t quite shake the images of toned, big-breasted bodies moaning and fucking in some impossible position on a pleather couch. I wanted people to think I was hot. I wanted to feel hot.

Luckily, Shine was great at making her performers feel comfortable. I snacked and chatted and before we began the actual scene, she and I, along with my two fellow scene-mates, blocked out what we would do and where we would do it. The two people I would be having sex with were also first timers and our collective nervousness broke the ice. By the time the actual sex began, I was chagrined to find out that it was all far less sexy than I had imagined. We started and stopped a lot. My
makeup and hair wilted under the hot lights and warm, misty air—the result of so many people crammed into a little room. But, thankfully, no one expected me to give extreme fake moans. I understood that I could be as into it as I felt like being. If something didn’t feel good, I could speak up and we would all move things around; no one was judging me, and everyone was as enthusiastic about what we were creating. Filming the sex was a challenge. Most “real life” sex doesn’t have a camera person recording all the juicy bits, so one need not worry about the angles the camera is able to capture; there is no concern about “opening up” and making sure that a camera can fit into the tight spots. It’s hard to feel like you’re truly just having a sexual experience with a stranger when there are seven other people in the room and everyone is laughing about your having just kicked the main cameraman in the head. It was an “aha” moment as I realized why porn was full of so many contorted positions: the camera needed to see everything, so the rest of the bodies had to get out of the way. I have since watched the outtakes and behind the scenes from that first shoot many times. Each time, I am struck by how much hilarity there was. We, the performers, were naked, brand new to porn, and trying our very best to be sexy, yet we were angling arms and legs behind heads and up on apple boxes, feet being held off camera by a production assistant who was trying not to laugh. But that day, I felt like I was jumping headfirst into something unknown. For all my trepidation, I was, as I had hoped, authentic to my sexuality. I came away from that first experience with a positive feeling about the possibilities of pornographic performance in my life. A door had been opened, and I saw future opportunities that I found intriguing and exciting.

I don’t imagine that choosing to perform in porn is right for everyone, but it turned out to be great for me. That first shoot engaged my exhibitionist streak. I liked the performance and how I felt sexually embodied and in control of my representation. It was not a manipulation and I was not duped; I chose how to be, what to show, what to do. It was as if I was sharing with the world my sexual best—those specific moments of sex when I felt good about my body and my most sexy. I had shown a woman at her most strong and confident. It felt good. My greatest hope was that some woman, somewhere, would see it and think, “She looks like she is having so much fun, I bet I could too.”

Critical praise for Shine’s film
The Crash Pad
solidified my feeling that I had done something different in the world of pornography. Though I didn’t know it at the time,
The Crash Pad
would be lauded as the hallmark of a new kind of pornography called “feminist.”

Returning to the subject of authenticity, I will begin by saying that it is a thorny but necessary topic when talking about porn. Webster’s dictionary defines authentic as: “not false or copied, genuine. Entitled to acceptance or belief because of agreement with known facts or experience.” When Shine and I first talked, we both believed that the majority of mainstream porn was inauthentic and not in agreement with what we knew to be true of our sexualities and the sexualities of those around us. “Authenticity” took on a somewhat mythological quality and became the Holy Grail in our vision for pornographic filmmaking: if we could achieve it, we truly would have transcended the existing constraints of the known porn world. We considered authentic porn our goal. Even now, this far into my porn career, I still reference the concept of authenticity as a sizeable part of my rationale for the porn that I make. It is a term that I use frequently to explain my position and identity as a porn performer. By situating myself inside my understanding of authenticity and explaining that to interviewers and interrogators, I also protect myself from some of the criticism that dogs other porn performers. Of course, what is “authentic” varies among individuals. When I say I’m making authentic porn, it means I prioritize my sexuality, which has allowed me a much less-criticized position than a female performer who may not have thought as much about authenticity in sexual representation.

It would be relatively easy for me to create an “us vs. them” view of porn, placing myself squarely on the intellectualized and thusly superior side, while putting other actresses and porn makers on the opposite side. Given my criticisms of mainstream porn, I could do that readily and in many instances make a case for myself, but I don’t. Almost as soon as I touted myself as new and different, feminist film watchers leveled one of my very own critiques at me: they said I embodied a traditionally beautiful body type like those in mainstream porn. I am thin and Caucasian and even if inadvertently, I was perpetuating the very entrenched porn stereotype of the ideal white female form. As a woman who has always felt like the antithesis of the ultimate female beauty, that accusation made me uncomfortable but was unfortunately undeniable. When I began in the porn business, I wanted to shatter physical stereotypes, but, over time, I have realized that though I may feel non-normative, I am not that far left of the norm. Personal experience has shown me that while my “look” is not appealing to every filmmaker, it is much more accepted than women who are not white, not thin, or not conventionally attractive. It is a privilege that I have been forced to acknowledge and one that is not always easy to accept. How can I claim an alternative and marginalized
position while my own body, gender presentation, and beauty aesthetic reinforce stereotypes for some viewers?

I struggle to blaze a trail for women while accepting my own whiteness and privilege. I “get” to be in porn, to raise my conceptual fist to the mainstream because I am close enough to the mainstream to even be let inside in the first place. This has been a bitter pill to swallow, but it reminds me that the deeper work of change to the representation of women in porn has to occur beyond me. It will come when we have greater inclusion of women of all body types, ages, and ethnicities in porn to counter the dominant imagery. I have attempted to demonstrate that belief and that need for change whenever possible. Part of how I create authentic images that reflect my queer sexuality is to work with people I’m attracted to—people who identify along a broad spectrum of genders, sexualities, and backgrounds. In showing what my sex looks like, I have been lucky enough to be a part of showing the sex of these individuals, who defy societal norms. Whether the porn we make together is consciously subversive or if it’s solely sexy, fun, and performative, I hope it accomplishes my goals: to bring more authentic sexualities to porn, to change the images that dominate porn, and to transform what people think porn is. A large part of my body of work (more than two hundred scenes to date) reflects the spirit of that first film: queer and defiant on several fronts.

Recasting the dominant images of porn is one of the main goals defined and championed by the adult-film trailblazers who have come before me, such as the self-described feminist pornographer Tristan Taormino. She defines feminist pornography as porn that includes a fair and ethical process, safe working conditions, collaboration with performers, positive representations, three-dimensional human beings, pleasure and orgasms for everyone, not just men, responses to dominant images, and the creation of new ones. Taormino’s definition includes the major themes of what constitutes a pornographic movie and to hers I would add, as my work has championed, the inclusion of different bodies and people of varying genders.

After
The Crash Pad
came out, Shine’s work garnered a reputation for being inclusive (showing gender fluidity, people of color, BDSM) and community oriented. I was performing regularly for Shine at this point and somewhat unknowingly became a part of the growing wave of new queer and feminist porn. In late 2007, an interviewer asked me to share my thoughts on whether I thought the emerging genre was feminist. I maintained that it wasn’t about feminism so much as it was about women:

I think that depends on what your definition of “feminist” is. I think a broad definition for people can be “woman focused,” and is this porn that? For sure. For others though, “feminist” can have an entirely different definition and for some feminists, pornography is exploitative no matter how or for whom it’s made. So it depends.

I recall feeling like I wanted to distance myself from feminism; though I was excited that the feminist porn genre, and queer porn especially, was getting press for being positive, I did not want to identify myself that way. I came from a generation of young women who learned about the feminism of the past, one that primarily did not support pornography, pornographic performance, and women being pornographers. I had taken women’s studies classes where we read Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, and about the male gaze and the notion that women were powerless in the patriarchal dynamics that defined their world. I realize now that I believed that the perspectives of antiporn feminists represented the pervasive view among all feminists. I internalized their negative rhetoric, and it affected how I thought about the work I was doing. My starting assumption was that the majority of people—especially women—would look down on me for the work I did. When asked if I thought I was a feminist or if the work that I was doing was feminist, I immediately responded “no” because my paradigm was that it couldn’t really be. It took a few years and getting to know many different people, both feminists and not, to change that perspective for me.

When I look at past critiques of me and of the porn I made, I realize that the memory I have of any direct criticism is, in fact, incorrect. In my mind, I was certain that out in the ether feminists were pointing fingers at me and adding my face to the canon of warped women who had been conceptually and physically enslaved by porn. Though I could not find any specific evidence of that, I still imagined that anyone who identified as feminist would be disapproving and hypercritical.

The idea of choice, in addition to authenticity, was a common theme I discussed with interviewers when they hinted at or asked directly about the stigma of my profession. “Do I feel like a lot of pornography is made with the male gaze, made to objectify women, to pervert feminine sexuality into something that is only for men and for their consumption? Totally. . . . I am very lucky that I don’t feel like I have made films or been involved in things that have only had that objective. I don’t feel like I have ever been treated that way.”