The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (43 page)

So why was there suddenly so much conflict over the sexual representation of women in the public sphere? In my view, it was a function of demographics. Women who had graduated from high school in the late 1970s—when feminist thought was influencing ideas on sexuality—were now in their midtwenties, a natural time for sexual exploration, experimentation,
and inquiry. Feminism introduced us to such concepts as “our bodies, our rules,” while prominent feminist author Robin Morgan proclaimed, “Porn is the theory, rape is the practice.” We were encouraged to take responsibility for our own orgasms while being told that penetration was the patriarchal practice of colonizing women’s bodies, and any woman who wanted that was not liberated. These opposing messages left all women doubting their sanity. If women wanted to practice role-play or power exchange, penetrate their partners or be penetrated by them, or consume pornography in their private lives, their feminist credentials were called into question. In defining the personal as political, this stripe of feminism also defined the political as personal. We were told, in the words of eighteenth-century Quakers, to “speak truth to power,” but, when we did so in our own individual voices, we stood accused of betraying our gender as a whole. This battle is far from over, and it’s not a good sign that antisex conservatives from the right now use feminist/progressive slogans to push their antiwoman, antichoice agenda.

At the most visceral level, I got into porn because that’s where the naked women were. I came here for the sex. I wanted casual, no-feelings-hurt, no-U-Haul sexual contact with women without the attendant complexities. I wasn’t looking for lesbian romance, or romance of any other kind. Porn offers all the fun of dating with none of the hassle. I know some people find this attitude disquieting at best, disgusting and immoral at worst, but it very much suited my temperament. I also wanted easy sexual contact with men, but had no time or patience for the mating dances of the club or bar scenes, places where people have to pretend that sexual contact could, should, or would evolve into romantic relationships. I have never liked being with people who are drunk or high or otherwise partying simply because they can’t admit to themselves that they just want to get laid. In porn, I discovered, I’m not subjected to a partner’s projections of guilt and shame over their own desires that leads them to call me whore and slut, while assuming no responsibility for their own behavior and motivations. My desires and proclivities dovetailed nicely with the job requirements for a porn performer, to my benefit and, admittedly, to that of those who hired me.

But beyond providing a perfect playground for my hedonistic indulgences, I saw and continue to see porn as a means by which to share my deeply held ideas and opinions about sex, pleasure, love, and intimacy with other like-minded folks. I’m scientifically minded, and porn gave me a laboratory where I could conduct my experiments, a diverse pool of enthusiastic subjects, a reliable subsidy for my research, and feedback
from the end users as to its efficacy. I already had a degree in nursing from San Francisco State University. Our culture sees much of sexuality as deviant and sick, and sick people need a nurse’s care. Most people I’ve met in the course of my career are in some way wounded around their sexuality. They need to talk to someone who can give them perspective about their situation. In taking on that position, I would become a role model of healthful behavior, advocate for those who cannot speak for themselves, and educate people about sexual health and literacy. While people may be advised to talk to their healthcare providers about health-related sexual issues, many of those professionals are, themselves, deeply conflicted about sexuality and pornography (as is the greater culture), which makes going to them with one’s sexual problems highly fraught. I can’t sleep with all of my fans personally (though I’d dearly like to), so I hope that my sex-education videos can inspire them and give them the necessary tools for sexual fulfillment.

I admit that I also love performing. I can’t sing, dance, act, or play an instrument well enough to make a living at it (at least partially answering my father’s question about the violin), but as a porn performer I can express myself as both artist and scientist. Sex is my subject in both realms. The choice to pursue my work in this manner does not come without cost. Once you start showing your naughty bits on film, what you create is by definition “pornography,” with the stigma, limitations, and freedom that come with doing so. If I had no other mission than to make myself happy by engaging in sex as performance, the fact that doing so makes it nearly impossible to be taken seriously in any other context wouldn’t be particularly bothersome. My work, after all, is the ultimate full-contact improvisation exercise. We arrive on the set, where, as characters, we create a sexually themed story, or parable if you will, enact it, and then we go home. Some days are longer than others, but the work itself never gets old because the varieties of sexual desire and expression are infinite and never take the same form twice.

However, having always brought my broader philosophical mission to a medium relentlessly focused on commercial entertainment, I’ve had to subvert that medium to my own ends more often than not, and I would be the first to admit that I have not always succeeded. At best, I like to think I’ve avoided allowing the industry to use me to its ends to the detriment of mine.

Porn inevitably delivers an education, and acts to some degree as a role-modeling force (though I think the latter secondary effect is greatly over-dramatized by those who see porn as a danger to society) but many
of the messages it delivers are shallow, dishonest, and reflective of our culture’s shame and confusion about sexuality, as opposed to celebrating that sexuality in its power and diversity. Except for that very specific genre of porn specifically intended for educational purposes, it’s a less-than-ideal classroom at best and I’ve had to work uphill against its false assumptions throughout most of my career.

While I’m not particularly spiritual, I identify strongly with the Jungian archetype of the sacred prostitute and her vital role in sexual healing. I fantasized about inhabiting that role more literally when I was younger but did not dare work as an actual prostitute. Laws against sexual commerce only hurt women and all consensual sex work should be decriminalized
now,
but until it is, confining my incarnation of that archetype to the safe environs of a legal porn shoot has been the only way I felt comfortable performing that healing function, even if only in the abstract. In this way I “touch” more people at one time through the entertainment products in which I participate, but cannot touch them literally. Actress Cornelia Otis Skinner said, “Woman’s virtue is man’s greatest invention.” That phrase is both true and telling: everyday men and women both carry the heavy load and pay the cost for this retrograde notion of virtue. Female sexual agency remains a contentious subject that sparks fierce debate and displays of moral outrage, bigotry, and murderous violence. Our culture continues to punish women for their sexuality, from woman-on-woman slut shaming, to continuing attempts by local, state, and federal government agencies to limit access to effective family planning. Our country’s “honor killings”—ranging from the murder of abortion providers to the killing of a partner in a fit of jealous “If-I-can’t-have-you-then-
nobody
-can-have-you!” rage—are almost always connected to women’s sexual autonomy and/or health.

In a culture that still makes it very difficult, if not impossible, to speak freely about sexual issues, it’s hardly surprising that women and men are reduced to searching a medium meant for pure entertainment for nuggets of truth, and the results are mixed at best.

Before I produced my first deliberately educational movie,
Nina Hartley’s Guide to Oral Sex,
I understood that all performances could be instructional, hitting both intellectual and emotional targets. Porn, however contrived or silly it may be, is the only place in our culture for people to actually witness sex, and viewers watch closely to see what’s going on. I’ve always role-modeled effective sexual techniques useful to the pleasure of both men and women, hoping people pay close attention and might try them out with their lovers or spouses. To those who ask
how I can still enjoy what I do after so many years, the answer is simple. I’ve held firm to a core principle: if I don’t do it at home for free, I won’t do it on camera for money. Fans notice my enthusiasm and I repeatedly hear, “You really seem to enjoy what you’re doing,” said with wonder and gratitude. I do not do that which I do not enjoy. I do not believe that just because something appears in a pornographic picture it will be welcomed by either men or women as actual practice in their own bedrooms, nor should it be. But I do believe some porn, particularly porn that is most focused on mutual pleasure in whatever form—including those that challenge conventional notions of pleasure, like consensual BDSM—can be of instructional value.

Despite the rancor directed at men and their sexuality throughout the 1970s and continuing into today, I’ve found that by and large men are eager students. They want very much to be good lovers and for their partners to enjoy themselves in bed. As a dancer with full freedom of expression while on stage, I found that all it took was a naked woman speaking her truth about sex, without shaming or blaming, and they were all ears. I lost a lot of my fear of men in that first strip club where I danced when I saw how they, too, were victims of antisex conditioning. It was just different from the antisex conditioning that women have traditionally received. Men and women are both wounded by our cultural constraints on sexuality, and have been falsely set up as adversaries when they’re meant to be allies in life and love.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a moving picture is worth ten thousand words. I can either describe how to do a particular technique or demonstrate just how I twist my wrists or use my hands and the viewer can grasp it immediately. Sex is largely a physical skill set like any sport or marital art, and can be taught. How to
apply
that skill set, with whom, where, and when is left to the individuals. In that respect, some of the lessons of even the most frivolous or vulgar pornography are still more enlightented than those taught by mainstream entertainment.

Unlike Hollywood tropes, in which the “transgressive” woman must meet a horrible fate for crossing some invisible line, at the end of a porn movie the woman has had orgasms and lives to tell the tale. There are no Anna Kareninas or Emma Bovarys in porn.

Porn shows a wide variety of sexual behavior among all sorts of people with no one dying at the end: group sex, sex with toys, sex with people of different races, sex with oneself, sex in public, anal sex, sex with much older or younger partners, sex with people of different genders, and more. In this way, porn is very radical. No matter how outrageous
and buffoonish, puerile or stupid the portrayal may be, nobody dies, nobody goes to jail, and nobody’s hurt. When we keep in mind that porn is essentially live-action cartoons burlesquing social convention, it doesn’t matter how realistic the set-ups may be, or how preposterous. Learning can happen with laughter, so if I can make someone laugh while they look at their issues, it helps drive the lesson home.

For all the hostility directed at porn for allegedly putting undue pressure on women to conform to a certain standard of beauty (leaving aside how porn affects men’s sexual self-image and confidence), it’s much less insidiously intolerant than mainstream media. When we can set aside our own prejudices toward porn’s assumed “message” (as if some porn council meets on alternate Tuesdays to plot how to oppress women), we see a wider variety of body types than what is welcome in either Hollywood or at Fashion Week: short, tall, curvy, boxy, skinny, bony, big butted, flat butted, big boobed, small boobed, blonde, brunette, redhead, ages eighteen to eighty, with factory-issue bodies or with cosmetic surgery enhancements, all are welcome who want to participate. Humans have an enduring fascination with nudity in general (and genitalia in particular) and porn certainly lets us have our fill of looking at a wide range of naked bodies, in full color action, without us having to actually try to meet these people ourselves.

Porn houses our sexual dreams, which are vitally important to our happiness. It’s important to see on screen things barely imagined, if only to allay our fears that we’re somehow disturbed or messed up in the head because I can say confidently that our tastes in porn say little about us as individuals and most of us can tell the difference between fantasy and fact, between the screen and our actual lives and relationships. We might be intrigued by something, or even learn something from a movie, but our essential natures will not be fundamentally affected or changed by exposure to porn. While all media, to say nothing of personal experience, affect our worldview, nothing removes individual responsibility for our behavior, no matter how loudly some proclaim otherwise. Picking up a few tricks from porn isn’t going to compromise anyone’s ability to have a healthy relationship if that person was capable of having such a relationship in the first place. It’s not our job to limit what can be represented. To do so arguably undercuts porn’s most critical social use, which is to challenge the notions of what sex can be.

Porn does not generally educate people well when it comes to how to have sex. It depicts cunnilingus poorly because the lens is blocked if the action is done correctly. With rare exceptions, it doesn’t spend nearly
enough running time on foreplay and invests too much in the final minutes of hydraulic penetration.

But porn does offer us tantalizing clues about why to have sex, or to have a different kind of sex than we might otherwise have considered. At its best, it expands our definitions of pleasure rather than circumscribing them. That’s the work I’ve been doing for the past quarter century, whether the people I worked for were in on the game or simply thought I was doing a hot scene that would help sell a lot of boxes. I stayed on message no matter what the script, and I think the other performers whom people remember over the years have done the same in their own ways. They took something of their real sexuality and used it to make their scenes uniquely their own. By enabling them to do that, yes, porn has served an educational function even when it was only out to show us a good time. There’s nothing wrong with learning how to have a good time.