Women who like porn

                                                  

By Sangeeth Sebastian

It’s hard to imagine a subject with fewer intellectual or literary pretensions than porn. So why would women with such highbrow pedigree like Celin Shimizu, Constance Penley and Mireille Miller-Young, all of them professors at the University of California, U.S., take on something quiet so… unseemly?

The answer they offer through The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure (The Feminist Press), jointly edited with Tristan Taormino, a feminist porn producer, is this: the sensational success of EL James’s mega-selling erotic novel Fifty Shades of Grey (which will make its Hollywood debut next month) shows there is great demand among women for explicit sexual representations.

The book is meant as tribute to women who create and perform in porn but whose XXX fantasies are supposedly left out from the chauvinistic world of mainstream porn. The book contains personal accounts of reigning and yesteryear porn stars who have knowingly entered the industry to make women like them more visible (especially lesbians and people with disabilities) only to lament about its misogynistic and sexist ways and crave for an alternative narrative (not necessarily softer porn as women too like dirty stuff) that caters sensitively to the needs and desires of horny women.

Yes, it is a tricky attempt to segregate porn as something that can be liberating and empowering for women, if made the right way but downright degrading, if the recommended rules of production are ignored.

So what are the rules? (1) A woman had a hand in the production, writing, direction etc, of the work (2) It depicts genuine female pleasure and or (3) It expands the boundaries of sexual representation on film and challenges stereotypes that are often found in mainstream porn (or in other words devoid of the de rigueur money shot where a male partner ejaculates on the face of his female partner in the throes of ecstasy). The ground rules are borrowed from Feminist Porn Awards, an annual event held in Canada since 2006 to honour adult stars. For anti-porn activists, this delineation can seem as specious as Pakistan’s distinction between “good” Taliban and “bad” Taliban.

That’s because, writes Candida Royalle, a popular adult film star who pioneered the genre of erotic movies by and for women in the 1980’s “our society still can’t conceive that a relatively sane young woman would choose to go into sex work for any reason other than desperation.” Continues Royalle “sitting down to an interview, inevitably the first thing I’m asked is how I got into porn. I often get the sense that what they’d really like to ask me is “What a nice girl like you…?” she writes.

The attitude remains the same despite the crossover success of former porn stars including Sasha Grey and Sunny Leone. It is this perception of vulnerability and exploitation which Royalle and her fellow feminist porn enthusiasts aim to upend through their works termed as “ethical porn.”

The core philosophy of ethical porn is collaboration, according to Taormino, the porn producer. “Performers set their own pay rates and know up front what I am hiring them to do; there is absolute, explicit consent and no coercion of any kind,” she writes.

Yet for all its sex positive aphorisms and attempts to build a sub culture, the book doesn't offer much to critics who argue that the system itself is flawed or question whether the porn enthusiasts would willingly let their children pursue a career in porn.  Though India doesn't have an official porn industry to boast off, being a country that avidly consumes smut, I would have liked to see these issues addressed more in depth. May be that’s not the purpose of this book.