The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (37 page)

13
. David Andrews,
Soft in the Middle: The Contemporary Softcore Feature in Its Contexts
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2006).

14
. Susie Bright, “The History of Inter-racial and Black Adult Video,”
Susie Bright’s Erotic Screen: The Golden Hardcore & The Shimmering Dyke-Core
(Bright Stuff: 2011).

15
. Ibid.

16
. Celine Parreñas Shimizu,
The Hypersexuality of Race: Performing Asian/American Women on Screen and Scene
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).

17
. Celine Parreñas Shimizu,
Straitjacket Sexualities: Unbinding Asian American Manhoods in the Movies
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012).

18
. Mireille Miller-Young,
A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women, Sex Work, and Pornography
(Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming).

19
. Thomas Waugh,
Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

20
. Thomas Waugh, “Men’s Pornography: Gay vs. Straight,” in
Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Essays on Popular Culture,
eds. Corey Creekmur and Alexander Doty (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 307–27.

21
. Richard Dyer, “Coming to Terms: Gay Pornography,”
Only Entertainment
(New York: Routledge, 1992), 121–34.

22
. Kobena Mercer, “Skin Head Sex Thing: Racial Difference and the Homoerotic Imaginary,” in
How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video,
ed. Bad Object Choices (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991), 169–222.

23
. Richard Fung, “Looking for My Penis: The Eroticized Asian in Gay Video Porn,” in
How Do I Look? Queer Film and Video,
ed. Bad Object Choices (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991), 145–68.

24
. Earl Jackson Jr., “A Graphic Specularity,”
Strategies of Deviance: Studies in Gay Male Representation
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).

25
. Joseph Slade,
Pornography and Sexual Representation: A Reference Guide
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001).

26
. Constance Penley, “Crackers and Whackers: The White Trashing of Porn,” in
White Trash: Race and Class in America,
eds. Annalee Newitz and Mat Wray (New York: Routledge, 1996), 89–112.

Cum Guzzling Anal Nurse Whore: A Feminist Porn Star Manifesta

LORELEI LEE

Lorelei Lee
studies and teaches writing at New York University and at the San Francisco Center for Sex and Culture. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in
Transfer, $pread
magazine, and
Denver Quarterly,
as well as in the anthologies
Hos, Hookers, Call Girls, and Rent Boys
and
Off the Set.
Lee has worked in the adult film industry since 1999, toured nationally with the Sex Workers’ Art Show, and is a Literary Death Match Champion. Along with Stephen Elliot, she is the co-writer of the independent film
About Cherry.
She lives in San Francisco and Brooklyn. Her writing can be found on the blog,
I Deserve This,
guesswhatideservethis.wordpress.com
.

I
’ve been working in pornography for over ten years. That is my entire adult life. More images exist of me performing naked—or more accurately, performing in lip gloss, false eyelashes, stilettos, latex, lingerie, and all manner of other symbolic accoutrements and scraps of skimpy fabric—than images of me doing anything else.

I didn’t choose this profession as a political act. You will not hear me say that I decided to get naked because I believed it would be sexually liberating or empowering. I’m not going to tell you that when I took off my clothes in front of the camera for the first time, I immediately knew I was on a path to self-discovery. The journey of the last ten years was not something I planned, and the truth of my experience is much more complicated than the public discourse on pornography and sex—shouted out in large, bright headlines from magazine and newspapers—would have you believe. What I can tell you is that as I continued to do this work—as I came up against my own ideas about femininity, power, and sex—I found strength in the part of my identity that developed out of my experiences as a sex worker. I found a manifesto of my own ethics, and I found that, to my surprise, I believe deeply in the positive power of sexually explicit imagery.

I am a feminist, and I am a pornographer. I have been paid for sexual performances of every kind. After a lot of reckoning, I’ve come to believe that the work I continue to do makes the world a better place for women to live in.

This, of course, is a story that has been written before. Though it took some time for me to discover the radical, sex-positive writings of feminists like Nina Hartley, Patrick Califia, Carol Queen, Tristan Taormino, Annie Sprinkle, and Dorothy Allison, I did finally discover them, and their work has provided necessary comfort and advice for me during the last decade. Lately however, I’ve read an onslaught of sensationalist books and articles about pornography, feminism, violence against women, exploitation, prostitution, and/or how feminism and/or pornography have affected the libidos of men and the “success” of women at landing long-term partners (see “The End of Men” in
The Atlantic,
“Why Monogamy Matters” in the
New York Times,
“Why Are Men So Angry” in
The Daily Beast,
“How Porn Is Affecting the Libido of The American Male” in
New York Magazine
). These articles swim in my head—they provide a dizzying view of attitudes about sexuality in the US, using lurid soft-focus photos and reports of the writer’s own porn viewing, or the porn viewing of someone they know, that almost invariably offers only a narrow platform for an ideological argument, rather than any kind of thoughtful or encompassing analysis. Opinion pieces are fine, but I’m hungry for something more.

When it comes to pornography, it seems that anyone who has ever seen a naked image feels empowered to offer a definitive perspective, but these interpretations rarely allow for the tremendous range of experiences through which pornography enters people’s lives. Many of the authors of recent books and articles on porn fail to take into account how race, class, religion, region, gender, and orientation affect the conditions under which adult material is viewed or analyzed. They disregard the variations in what is considered “pornographic,” and they don’t consider the larger societal conditions under which the homogeneity of the bulk of American-produced adult imagery is directly correlated with hundreds of years of stereotyped expectations of femininity. They fail to realize that these ideas of femininity might be reflected in some porn, but are not caused by it, and neglect to address the adult imagery being made that directly combats these stereotypical expectations. Finally, the authors of these pieces seem to hold the porn-viewing audience in low regard, forgetting that pornography—like other forms of consumable narrative—is ultimately a genre of fantasy, and that the vast majority of
its viewers are entirely aware of its unreality. In fact, the reason why so much of pornography is even sexy is because it strays so far from what most people expect or even want in their real lives.

These are the points I’d like to discuss here. But first, the answer to the question that gets asked at every cocktail party, in every classroom, and online discussion forum: How did a nice, smart girl like you end up in a job like this?

I am a feminist by birth. I was raised with feminism in the same way people are raised with religion. I come from a line of fierce women who have taken what they were given and made what they needed out of it.

I was born in a welfare clinic. My mother took me home from the clinic to the low-income apartment she’d found with the help of the nuns from the Catholic home for girls where she’d stayed during her pregnancy. She had spent a year in community college and three semesters at the University of California, Berkeley, on a gymnastics scholarship before getting pregnant and dropping out of school.

In college, my mother discovered the newly academicized field of women’s studies, but she was a feminist long before her time in California. She’ll tell you she was a feminist before she knew the word—since the day, at the age of ten, when she realized that women were not allowed to become priests, and her own mother told her that because she was so smart and strong-willed, she could probably be the first female priest if that was what she really wanted to be. She’ll tell you she became a feminist that day; she believed she could be whoever she wanted.

It’s likely that I get my desire to perform from my grandmother. When she was a teenager, my grandmother worked at a dime store, playing songs for a nickel apiece on the piano, often for sailors and soldiers on leave. Soon after that, she was an entertainer in the USO. Even after the war ended, after she married and had nine children in as many years, my grandmother returned to the stage for regional productions in the small upstate New York town where she lived. Once she played Adelaide in
Guys and Dolls.
My mother—a teenager then—was shocked to see her mother singing on stage in only a slip. My grandmother doesn’t know what I do for a living, but I know she understands the thrill of captivating an audience. I know that as a dime-store piano player, she learned the art of presentation—of selling a kind of fantasy of accessibility.

My mother, though not a performer, has a different kind of public fearlessness. By the time I was five years old, I had campaigned door-to-door in a stroller for low-income housing and the Equal Rights Amendment. I’d ridden an overnight bus to Washington, DC, to march on the capitol for abortion rights. My wardrobe was screen-printed with political
slogans like Take Back the Night, Women Unite, and The ERA is for My Future.

My mother still likes to tell the story of the time I attended kindergarten in a t-shirt emblazoned with a red banner:
Reproductive Freedom: A Woman’s Right.
My kindergarten teacher called me to her desk to tell me that my clothing might not be appropriate for someone my age. She asked me if I even knew what my t-shirt meant. I’ve been told I replied, “Mrs. Bell, if a woman can’t decide what to do with her own body, how can she possibly be in control of the rest of her life?” There—you might think—lies the root of a rationale for all my future economic choices.

I was in the sixth grade the first time someone called me a slut. That person, you might be surprised to hear, was my mother. It was my first day of middle school, and I had decided to wear a white t-shirt, a pair of purple shorts, a beaded necklace, and black lace-up boots with a two-inch heel. I was proud of this outfit. I felt good in it.

In the years between kindergarten and sixth grade, my family had—for a number of reasons—moved twelve times. My mother married, had another child, and divorced. She became ill, and we moved from apartment to apartment as she changed boyfriends and jobs. I was about to start at yet another new school, and first impressions were crucial. I believed that this outfit made me look unique, what my mother called “artsy.”

When I walked into the kitchen that morning, my mother stood in her nightgown stirring a cup of coffee. She looked at me and grunted under her breath.

“What?” I said. In addition to a newly developing sense of personal style, I was just beginning to learn the adolescent art of intoned insolence.

My mother looked me up and down before she said, “Is that what you’re wearing?”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s just that—” she paused, proceeded slowly, “People might think you’re kind of a slut.” She said the word with a certain hesitance, like she wasn’t sure if she should tell me, but she believed it was necessary, for my own good. As a woman who had lived though years of social and familial shaming for being an unmarried Catholic mother, she may have had good reason to believe she was acting in my best interest.

In that moment, I felt a flood of anger, disgrace, and the surging hormones of adolescence. I couldn’t deny the power of that word.
Slut.
In my mother’s mouth, it carried a humiliating weight I cannot describe. I stormed out of the kitchen.