The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (29 page)

35
. Joanna Rytel, Booklet Text,
Dirty Diaries,
directed by Joanna Rytel et. al. (Stockholm, Sweden: Mia Enberg and Story AB Productions and Njuta Films, 2009), DVD.

36
. Lee Wallace,
Lesbianism, Cinema, Space, The Sexual Life of Apartments
(New York and London: Routledge, 2009), 133–34.

37
. Ahmed,
Queer Phenomenology,
4.

38
. Ann Cvetkovich,
An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality and Lesbian Public Cultures
(Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2003), 88–89.

39
. Cvetkovich,
An Archive of Feelings,
63.

40
. Ibid., 4, 56.

41
. Ahmed,
Queer Phenomenology,
170.

Where the Trans Women Aren’t: The Slow Inclusion of Trans Women in Feminist and Queer Porn

TOBI HILL-MEYER

Tobi Hill-Meyer
is a multiracial trans activist, writer, and filmmaker. She is the director of
Doing It Ourselves,
and winner of the Emerging Filmmaker Award at the 2010 Feminist Porn Awards. Hill-Meyer started producing media to fill the void of diverse trans characters and to offer an alternative to the overwhelmingly exploitative and exotic ways that trans women’s sexuality is often portrayed. Her work can be found at
HandbasketProductions.com
.

I
got into porn because of Camp Trans. Camp Trans started as a protest of trans women’s exclusion from the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival in 1991. After two decades, Camp Trans has transformed into an amazing trans activist training and community space, an annual event that takes place near the music festival. I’d been aching to go for years, but I didn’t have the money. Although attendance was based on a sliding scale donation, the five-thousand mile road trip to get there and back would require several hundred dollars. A lover offered to connect me with a photographer she had worked with at
ShemaleYum.com
. One two-hour shoot for them would give me the equivalent of a month’s income as a tutor and fund my entire trip, so I decided to do it.

Given the name of the website, I didn’t expect everything would be supportive and empowering—and it wasn’t. My experience wasn’t wholly negative, either. Significantly, it was the only work environment I’ve ever had where I was out as trans and was never mis-pronouned or misgendered. I can’t say the same thing about any of the LGBT organizations I volunteered for at the time.

The shoot was a very uncomfortable, unsexy situation. I’m pretty confident in my ability to be sexy and attractive, but I wasn’t allowed to be sexy the way I would be with my own lovers or partners. I had to fit an entirely different model. Knowing that it was a work situation, I was certainly willing to compromise, but the whole situation set me off balance (both figuratively and literally). I’m a butch dyke and my sex life
has never focused much on penetration, but for the shoot I had to shave myself, put on stockings and heels, and hold my balance while leaning over and spreading my ass cheeks. The whole time I had to implicitly consent to being labeled by a horrible slur, “shemale.”

Of course, all of this made it that much harder for me to perform the basic functions of the job: maintaining an erection and orgasming on command. It was only a series of photos followed by five-to-ten minutes of video, and while I’m usually comfortable modeling for a camera, the whole situation made me nervous and uncomfortable. As things progressed I had to go farther and farther out of my comfort zone. After about an hour and a half of tiring work, many photographs, and much uncomfortable posing, it was my job to masturbate to orgasm. After about five minutes the photographer leaned in and said in a somewhat exasperated voice, “So, are you going to cum now?” As you can imagine, that kind of pressure only makes things more difficult. Especially when I couldn’t do the things that normally turned me on because some corporate executive decided it wasn’t sexy. I got through it, but I was pretty freaked out afterward. I was shaking so much that I needed to have my lover drive us home.

I probably could have found a work mode that would have allowed me to sufficiently dissociate and perform as someone else if it had been important enough, but I never got the opportunity to try because of my inability to ejaculate. It’s a pretty common condition among trans women; in fact, the ability to ejaculate is about as common (or uncommon) among cis women as it is among trans women. Despite this,
ShemaleYum.com
(and the other website I subsequently worked for) insisted upon it. It’s not a scene without a money shot. Both times I told them up front that my body didn’t do that, and was told that it would be okay. However, it turned out they were just hoping they could get me to ejaculate under “the right circumstances.”

During my second gig, I gave a much better performance. Knowing what to expect, I was better able to relax into my exhibitionist side, and I actually had a lot of fun feeling like I was turning on my audience. I had an incredible orgasm that lasted at least fifteen to twenty seconds, a rare feat that I’ve only caught on film a few times since. However, halfway into it—while I was still writhing and lost in the pleasure—the videographer put down his camera and asked me if I could fake an ejaculation by squirting lube on my stomach. I was too stunned to be angry. I was giving them gold and he wasn’t even recording it because a splash of fluid on my stomach was more important than a real orgasm.

The company would not hire me to do any more solos after that. I
could only do another scene if I worked with someone who did ejaculate. I talked it over with a partner who does and was prepared to do a scene, but heard back that the producers thought she was too “rough.” We could only guess this was because they didn’t see her as conventionally attractive, sufficiently feminine, or thin enough. After that, they stopped answering my emails.

With rare exceptions, trans women are not cast in any genre of mainstream porn (gonzo, features, girl/girl, and so on) except “tranny/shemale porn,” the derogatory phrase used to market trans women porn in the mainstream industry. Not only does that mean having your image publicized with derogatory terms, but “tranny/shemale porn” producers have a very specific list of conventions that they expect their “shemale” performers to follow. These include: wearing makeup and high heels, shaving one’s legs, appearing traditionally feminine, getting and keeping a strong erection, ejaculating, and either penetrating someone with your genitals or being penetrated. With all the expectations of producers and viewers of “tranny/shemale porn,” there is no place for someone like me—someone with short hair and unshaved legs wearing a dapper vest and fedora while packing a strap on and engaging in non-genitally focused sex.

When mainstream producers are challenged to change their conventions, they fear losing their existing audience that has been trained to expect and respond to those conventions. However, they sacrifice authenticity for convention. Mainstream sex work often (if not inherently) requires that the workers conform to someone else’s desires rather than express their own. I thought, there has to be a better way. There has to be an audience that values diversity over cookie-cutter scenes, pleasure over fluids, and authenticity over façade—it must exist because that’s the kind of porn my friends and I wanted to watch. We were an untapped market, and while that meant there was far less competition, it also meant that there was little to no infrastructure to reach us. The mainstream industry has been unwilling to depart from their formula because doing so would require reaching out to an entirely new group, one that might not even go into a porn store under typical circumstances. I’ve known of far too many people who were excited to explore their sexuality and interested in doing so through pornography, but gave up when they looked around at the porn that is available and could not find anything they liked.

Feminist and queer porn creates a space for authentic sexual representations. It’s done a good job of representing cis women’s sexuality, and I wanted to see porn that did the same for trans women. I knew of three
or four films made by trans men, and I had seen occasional appearances by trans men in queer cis women’s films. I didn’t know of a single trans woman in any feminist and queer porn. Was it really possible that no one had ever made hot, feminist, trans women-focused porn? I found just two examples of trans women in feminist porn: Jenny Mutation, who had about two minutes of screen time in
Dominatrix Waitrix
(2005), and Julie, who did a scene for The Crash Pad Series (2007), which won the 2009 Feminist Porn Award for Most Tantalizing Trans Scene. I look to both women as heroes and inspirations. At the same time, most of the people I talked to who watched these two scenes assumed that both women were cis, and the inclusion of trans women in these works was not well-publicized.

I want to emphasize that being seen as cis doesn’t take away from the magnitude of what they accomplished as the first trans women in queer pornography. Different trans people want different things, and some people just want to be fully recognized as their gender without attention being focused on their trans status; both scenes are great examples of that validation. However, I wanted more instances of representation, more visibility, and scenes that publicized their inclusion of trans women.

Since then, some improvements have been made. The Crash Pad Series is a clear example. At the time of this writing, there are five trans women actors in this series. Even though this is an improvement, this number is still significantly lower than the number of trans men and female-assigned genderqueers in the same series. This pattern holds true and is often even stronger in other parts of queer and feminist porn. It is telling that I continue to run into people who are under the impression that there are no trans women in the series at all.

This overall lack of representation is not entirely unexpected given that feminist and queer porn has its roots in the queer women’s community, where trans men are very visible while trans women are not. This is caused by the unique intersection of transphobia and misogyny, called transmisogyny. Historically, trans women have been systematically excluded and driven out of women’s spaces even when trans men have not. Society’s general valuing of masculinity permeates even queer women’s communities and trans men are regularly seen as attractive and desirable. Transphobic logic sees trans men as softer, gentler versions of “real men.” As a result, trans men are both exoticized and invalidated. The corollary is that trans women are seen as male and as a threat; however, just as often trans women aren’t considered except as an afterthought, or in many cases not thought of at all. As a result, trans men tend to be much more present in women’s communities than trans
women. This leads to a significant number of trans men in feminist and queer porn and very few trans women. This disproportionate representation is visible in pansexual-oriented queer porn, however, when even lesbian-oriented porn prioritizes trans men over trans women this problem becomes clearer. That’s why doing this work is not just about trans inclusion in general, but the inclusion of trans women specifically.

I knew that I couldn’t make trans women-focused porn in the mainstream, and while trans women were underrepresented in feminist and queer porn, I looked to feminist and queer porn producers as role models since they had made a significant impact in re-envisioning porn for queer women. Mainstream girl/girl porn tends to be full of sexist and heterosexist conventions. For example, oral sex with the performer’s head pulled back and tongue fully extended, which prioritizes the camera’s view over the pleasure of the activity; the awkwardly long fake nails that prevent effective mutual masturbation; or the clothing, makeup, and hairstyles that are specifically designed to appeal to straight men. Queer women viewers often respond that no one in girl/girl porn looked at all like the women in their community, at their bars, or who they are crushing out on. In response, adventurous queer women have been making their own porn for decades.

The misrepresentations in girl/girl porn that queer pornographers address have a lot in common with the discrepancies between “tranny/shemale porn” and trans women’s actual sexuality. Trans women are often uncomfortable with our genitals, yet mainstream porn focuses on big hard cocks to such a degree it’s not uncommon for trans women to find it emotionally triggering. As a response to that genital dysphoria, trans women often find a wide variety of creative sexual activities to engage in: tribadism, perineum stimulation, non-genital sensation play, use of strap-ons, penetration of inguinal canals (the areas of the body that the testes descend from, which can be penetrated with a finger or similar object by inverting the scrotal/labial tissue surrounding them), and so forth. The mainstream porn industry focuses almost exclusively on fucking and sucking.