The "Feminist" in Feminist Porn: A Theoretical Discussion

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*The follow is an excerpt from my larger article "Toward a Pussy Oriented Pedagogy: Choreography a Feminist Pornographic Imaginary"


The “Feminist” in Feminist Porn
   Gayle Rubin deploys her concept of the “charmed circle of sexuality” as a means to visualize the stratification of sexualities. The charmed circle occupies a privileged space and those acts within the circle are regarded as "natural" and evade certain forms of social and political policing. In our cultural imagination pornography is used as a container for many forms of “uncharmed sexualities." For it is a fact that pornography is one of few resources one can turn to for information or representations of these "uncharmed sexualities." As Linda William's remarks in Screening Sex, it “most the most of us ever get” particularly when it comes to peripheral sexualities. One is much more like to find information about and representations of anal sex, nonmonogamous sex, group sex, sex with toys, fetishes, BDSM or rough sex, homosexual and queer sex in pornography or porn related sex-ed materials than anywhere else. The relationship of the charmed circle to porn also works to further perpetuate stereotypes about women and their desires. Because these sexualities are found most frequently in pornography, which is still considered to be a monolith of films by and for men, than in mainstream culture, women who want or have uncharmed sex are seen as falsely conscious or as being coerced into doing them by a porn viewing man in their life. 
Pornography is also a likely place to find representations of women’s sexual pleasure and agency, as indicated and expanded by the feminist porn movement. Feminist porn as a phenomenon, a form of cultural production, and a movement “seeks to unsettle conventional definitions of sex, and expand the language of sex as erotic activity, an expression of identity, a power exchange, a cultural commodity, and even a new politics” (Taormino et. al 19). Traditional approaches to representation in media analysis precede from a feminist position frequently involves sorting out the ontological status of the film’s representation as “good” or “bad” for women or as a positive or negative representation of women. The focus on representation in feminist film theory has been critiqued not only by feminist pornographers, but in much of the feminist phenomenological theory from the past 10 years. Shifting from the rigid ontological binary of good/bad, these critiques of the representational model from theorists like Elena del Rio, Jennifer Barker, and Laura Marks have engaged the possibilities of bodies and film viewership to challenge feminist paradigms like the male gaze. In particular, Elena del Rio’s critique of the representational emphasis of feminist film theory provides a basis for thinking through feminist porn as both a revision of dominant sexual scripts and a reconfiguration of the role of representation.
In Deleuze and the Cinemas of Performance, Elena del Rio argues that “the body’s movements and gestures are capable of transforming static forms and concepts typical of a representational paradigm into forces and concepts that exhibit a transformative/expansive potential” (del Rio 6). What feminist pornography offers is a relation of this potential of the body to a type of feminist choreography. Choreography indicates that there is a model, but because this model is performative/affective it cannot be thought of as a rigid, unchangeable, set of observable points. Rather choreography and play are contingent, they touch upon, but in each movement contain the potential for rupture, flourish, and transformation. While the relation of feminist choreography to pornography’s play does not render considerations of representation worthless, it does offer another mode for navigating representation and affection.
To designate a film as “feminist” or “unfeminist” is to understand the film as containing an ontological essence. However, it also reflects a reduction of women as either proper or unproper feminist sexual subjects. Antiporn feminism and other sects emerging in the late 70s and 80s sought to understand some sexual acts, orientations, and desires as “feminist” and anything else as “unfeminist.” A line in the sand, feminists attempted to recreate and reconstruct the same mechanics of sexual stratification used to oppress women and contain them within phallocentric parameters: the charmed circle of sexuality. 
I find that Luce Irigaray’s deconstruction of Plato’s allegorical cave a useful way of thinking about how the concepts discussed earlier in this chapter and feminist porn resist an understanding of feminism as producing ontologies. In terms of pedagogical models few have been historically adopted and appropriated like that of the matrix model of the allegorical cave. In the 7th book of The Republic, Plato recalls Socrates’ allegory of the cave. The basic outline of the model goes like this: prisoners (men) exist in a cave in which they are chained. There necks are chained so that they cannot move their heads but instead see only what is in front of them. They cannot turn around. There exists, however, within the cave a fire, which illuminates the figures of the men and creates shadows upon the cave wall---the originary screen of projection. But there also exists from above an opening through which a sliver of sunlight peeks through. One at a time, the prisoners are released and pushed out of the cave by a warden/mentor/philosopher. When the prisoner sees the Sun, he is blinded, disoriented, and must adjust to this new “reality.” This adjustment relies on a complete disavowal of the shadows, which once functioned as the prisoner’s truths. While the initial dazzling of the Sun blinds the prisoner, he later adjusts, first by seeing his reflection in water, then Real objects, and then looking at the sun.
In her section “Plato’s Hystera” from The Speculum of the Other Woman, Luce Irigaray unravels the allegorical cave pedagogical model. She does so primarily by asking critical questions and through a power of suggestion, a power I find to be utilized and expanded in feminist porn as navigational mode. Though they may not move, she asks, why is the singular voice of the philosopher the only voice in the cave? Why would the prisoners not speak, and all at once in a glorious, tumultuous cacophony? From her questioning and suggesting, Irigaray points to the “holes” in the cave/womb pedagogical model in that it: 1) relies on silence and on a singular echo of the voice of the “philosopher” 2) enacts a ban on any dissident resonances and reverberations within the cave 3) situates shame as a necessary part of subject production, in that it implies a paradoxical relationship to the cave in which the subject only comes into being through the cave but must actively disavow ever believing that the shadows within the cave as “truths” and 4) forgets the “vagina,” the transitory space between the cave and the Sun. Further, the ultimate goal of cave emergence is an essential stable subject around which everything circulates and the “problem of ambiguity” is solved.
In that cultural feminism/anti-pornography feminism works towards perpetuating a proper, and thus stable and singular, feminist sexual subject that has rid herself of the shadows of her male identification, the anti-sex models of imagining and theorizing “female sexuality” can be thought of as appropriations of such a model and exhibit many of its problematics. Alice Echols outlines such models, as they circulated in feminist sexual politics from 1968 to 1983. She states
And while radical feminists were generally careful to distinguish between individual and political solutions, cultural feminists typically believe that individual solutions are political solutions. Cultural feminism’s validation of individual solutions not only encouraged the scrutiny of personal behavior rather than ideas, but moreover contributed to the development of standards of ‘liberated behavior’ (Echols 53).
In their attempts to theorize a stable feminist sexual subject, the pedagogical impetus of anti-sex/porn feminism approaches the sexualities of its “students” as if they are prisoners trapped in a cave of social construction in which they are blind to the singular Truth of liberated feminist sexuality. Pornography in this configuration is a threat to the formation of this feminist subject, with the power to “teach” men and women that male sexual supremacy is healthy and acceptable.
         Feminist porn, like that of Hartley and Taormino, offers not a feminist ontology but a feminist relation. Take for example the question “What does feminist porn look like?” Another way of phrasing this question is: how do you as a scholar identify feminist porn’s ontological essence of what feminist porn is by looking at it? Because of its investment in shifting the representation paradigm of feminist film critique it cannot be described by what it looks like but rather how it is made, produced, whose voices are included in the text but in the production, and how the viewer arrives at the text.
        Taormino discusses this shift in understanding representation in her essay “Calling the Shots: Feminist Porn in Theory and Practice.” For Taormino, the feminist in feminist porn is one of a relation to cultural production; it is a question of ethics and modes of engagement. She configures representation as something open to formation instead of a fixed essence. She writes:
Ultimately, I want the performers to participate in creating their own representations. Women and men are given choices: they choose who they will have sex with, they choose the positions they want to be in, they choose the toys they will play with, all based on what feels good to them, all based on their actual sexuality, not a fabricated script (260-61).
For Taormino, working conditions, ethical wages and representations that are understood as something created make up the “feminist” in her feminist porn.
By organizing pornography around a material ethical compass, Taormino’s use of “feminist” to describe her work, and the work of the other feminist pornographers, refers not to a stable subjective category but to a mode of existing, coming into contact with object, consuming, and discovering one’s own pleasure driven impulses. It is about how one arrives at conclusions rather than the conclusions themselves. It renegotiates the classic feminist pedagogy of singular conclusion on “female sexuality” but asserting the possibility of sexualities. It is not one because it is a type of journey, not a singular destination. It is sea on which to be sailed, a plural choreography, that never relies on a stable endpoint.
        While the alleogrical cave requires a muting of certain resonances, feminist porn as described and created by Taormino involves cacophony. Multiple voices emerge and contribute and often contradict each other. There is no feminist subject that emerges, only a feminist relation. It is a politics of reverberation and resonance that both “responds to dominant images with alternative ones and creates its own iconography” (Taormino 261). This response, however, concerns the paradigms of feminism as much as it concerns the paradigms of mainstream pornography.
Nina Hartley lays out the contradictions that have pervaded feminist response to sexuality by placing certain acts in a feminist taxonomy of creating a proper feminist subject.
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 (230).
The reconstruction of the charmed circle model of sexuality required women to cast off their former shadowy illusions in order to echo the singular voice of the philosopher (the proper feminist subject). Consequentially women involved in the movement found themselves questioning what was male identified shadow and what was “normal,” by feminist standards.One way feminist sex radicals responded, and through feminist porn continue to respond, was to disseminate information about sexuality, preventing physical harm, and leaving room for resonance in place of prescription.
           If something resonates carnally with a person it does not necessarily mean that she will immediately carry out or attempt to mimic whatever it is that resonates. As I have argued throughout resonance is one of the primary ways viewers learn from pornography. Williams articulates this concept. She remarks that
Even if we live our lives never ‘having’ sex we learn to appreciate and enjoy certain sexual ways of being, certain forms of (mild or powerful) arousal by watching the mediate sexual contacts of others, whether smoldering glances, kisses, more overt forms of friction or complex scenarios of power, abjection, and need (Williams 95).

The work of Nina Hartley and Tristan Taormino offers guided opportunities for resonance and identification to help women learn about different types of “paths to pleasure.” Even those, which are not so "charming." 

Valued Customers

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It is a corporate Christmas party, and I feel clumsy.

 I shift uncomfortably. I do not belong. Or maybe I do and I simply don't like it.

 Both options are unappealing, and I am unsettled by my contradictions.

 This is business.  Why am I here?

 This question threads together my day-to-day. I should be writing about my experiences, but my hand is heavy to the page. The questions begin to multiply, raising my pulse and stirring up doubt.  What is there to say? Why am I doing this? What is the value in me doing this?

 This last question is inextricably tied to how we view ourselves as social subjects. It is a question that could only be asked in a society whose economies of desire and pleasure are measured by singularity. How does your experience translate to a dollar value? What is your material worth to this company? Is it worth it?

 I said for a long time that feminist theory saved my life. My theoretical imagination allowed to me to render all that haunted me into abstraction. By turning everything around me into a concept I was in control, I knew what the relationship between pleasure and labor was, how patriarchy deploys shame to police women, and how sexism works. That was all undone very quickly as I heard stories, answered questions, and generally observed life in the shop.


There is a woman with a kind face and chestnut hair. She speaks in a slow Southern draw, different than the harsh fragmented Appalachian growl I am used to. Every time I open my mouth, she says "Bless your heart. You're just so good at this."

 There is a woman in line and she is scowling at me. It startles me and as I catch her eye, her lips curl in a snide snarl. Worthless, whore, disgusting. Its not the first time, and my eyes flash cobra gaze that I am everything she thinks I am.

 There is a man, who asks me what my boyfriend thinks of me "doing this." I tell him that I would not date someone who doesn't respect and value my decisions. He says yes, but he can't imagine a woman being around so many porn movies. I tell him that I write about porn.

 Which someone else interprets as that I write porn, which while untrue, sounds cooler.
A woman laughs at me in disgust.

 Someone tells me that a woman manager was once attacked by a customer.

 An elderly couple, who radiate love, are laughing happily together. The woman and I scour through racks on an empty Sunday morning, reading the plots to movies out loud together and trying to pick some good ones. "I want the girls to be pretty" she says.

 There is a woman recovering from a hysterectomy, who has a limited sexual vocabulary with which she is comfortable. And I am Nancy Drew, deciphering clues. There are a lot of whispered analogies and hushed euphemisms. She says thank you and means it.

 A man tells me that he was embarrassed, but feels better now.
All is full of slowly worded confessions, euphemistic codes, life narratives, and judgments. "Am I sick? Am I disgusting? Do you think I am disgusting?"

 I see people where no one is supposed to see them. Many arrive cloaked in shame and I often wonder if I am just another peg in the shame industrial complex.

 Distressed, I turned to Amber Hollibaugh's My Dangerous Desires which is one of the few places I feel home. In her introduction to the book, Dorothy Alison writes about how she hid in fiction writing to escape her immense fear of biography.
  • "The grace of fiction is that you can tell a larger story than the world has yet acknowledged---and pretend, at least in part, that you are not completely present in the story you tell" (xvii). 
The grace of academic writing lies in that it can and will only be understood by a small, specific population. But, this isn't grace so much as it is a privilege. Stripped of dense verbosity, what could I possibly have to say? Why should I say it?

 Because I want to. I find myself surrounded by women who know what they want. Women who articulate what they want and have gone off to find it. Women who are assured, and strong, and unafraid to inhabit a space that most assume we are all terrified to be in. They reassure me, they make me laugh, they trust me, and we share time together.

 I arrived there looking for what Lynn Comella calls "sex positive synergy." What I have found is a messy navigation of shame, wanting, histories, and hyper-capitalism. I found myself living in my body differently, and while I am often distraught and upset, I am often profoundly moved by the temporary intimacy some allow me.

Survivorhood Sexuality: A Quick Inquiry

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There is a line from an essay that continues to haunt me:

"During this time, women showed up at my workshops and broke down in tears as they began to talk about being sexually abused. Each time, I would ask them to leave, with the explanation that my groups were about exploring pleasure, not sexual abuse. They needed a therapist and then come back for a Bodysex Workshop later on" (p. 29)

The Feminist Porn Book is a book near and dear to me, but I take serious issue with this remark by trailblazer, Betty Dodson.

When I read this, I felt hurt. It confirmed some underlying fears that I have had in the past about attending workshops. I, someone who has immersed themselves in sex-positive feminism, could, and probably would have been, thrown out of a Betty Dodson workshop.

As a survivor, who has worked with survivors, I do somewhat understand her impulse to remove folks who are having a negative reaction in some way or another, but only to a certain extent. It's important to get the person away from whatever has triggered them, from the pressures of being stared at, so that you can respond to them individually, without causing a chain reaction with the others.

I know this because I've done this before.

But this doesn't seem like it was Dodson's intent. In the reasoning within the essay,  danger and pleasure are separate entities and her focus is on one and not the ways in which they interact. This ideology, however, furthers the assumption that sex-positivity diminishes the experiences of sexual assault and marginalizes survivors. Like me.

Survivors face a double bind in feminism at large. On the one hand, we are used as personifications of sexual abuse---we are to stay in our survivor position without regard to our actual sexual selves to make a political point. On the other, if we are kinky we can feel silenced often so that no one unjustly conflates our experience of trauma with our kinky dispositions. We should "transcend" our past.

There is not a lot of room for real talk about sexuality after surviving assault. Which is unfortunate, because at least for me, my experiences have effected my relationship with my body, with my own senses of pleasure, and my relationships. This is not to suggest that it is the end-all be-all of my sexual self but it is an important facet of my sexuality.

My body remembers things that I sometimes do not. This means that sometimes pressures and textures trigger me and I do not know why. I do different exercises, namely chakra meditation, to check in with my body but it is easy for me to understand how a workshop setting could trigger me and its easy for me to understand why these issues would come up in a orgasm workshop. It is not, however, easy for me to understand how a trained sex educator would not know a compassionate way to deal with a situation other than to kick a survivor out under the assumption that they can afford psychiatric care.

What mechanisms do we have in place to offer support in these cases? What can we do to make the workshop setting accessible and safe and free of shame for survivors?



Love Candy by Kendra "The Splendor"

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I have to be honest, Kendra was my least favorite of The Girls Next Door. By a lot. So when I saw her line of toys for Evolved I was already biased against them. 

Sorry.

 Early on in my job, a sale rep from Evolved came to the shop to show us their products and tell us about recent developments. It was a great day, she was a treat, but I was seriously disappointed with how little omph Evolved vibes seemed to have. I like my vibes to pack what I refer to customers as "industrial strength" vibrations. Now I know that every toy is not the Magic Wand and nor should they be, but a decent toy should have a  range between electric toothbrush and a power sander. It's important to note that I largely lean toward the power sander end of the spectrum. 

  I knew many of them just wouldn't cut it.
The marketing of the Love Candy line differs from the usual Evolved packaging which features each toy in a tin . Each of the Love candies comes in a faux leather-esque casing (which looks like a travel tooth brush holder) and makes for pretty great storage. 

 However, opening the packaging is like opening a set of Russian dolls. First is the cardboard box, which opens into the black leatherish hard casing, and then comes a tightly drawn pouch which you then must wrangle the toy from. The amount of packaging gives the illusion that the toy is much larger than it actually is. The Splendor is actually quite small compared to what the outer packaging suggests. 

The actual size of the toy did, however, ease other worries I had about its shape, mainly the toy's abrupt point. I put off using it for quite awhile because of its severe looking tip but when I actually handled it I realized that even though it looked "sharp" it wasn't as narrow at the top than I thought. I also liked the way it felt. It was a  hard plastic with a (very thin) silicone (maybe?) overlay, which gives it a smooth but firm feel.  


 The Splendor is 5 function and is controlled by one button. This button lights up  blue in the shape of a half moon (or potato? who knows) when the toy is on, which kind of makes it look like it could be made by Fisher Price. I say this but as soon as I turned it on, I couldn't stop an audible "ooooh" from escaping my lips when it happened. 


Part of the problem with single button toys is that it's easy to accidentally switch settings...usually at the worst possible moment, which can easily send me into a blind rage. On the Splendor, the button isn't super sensitive which keeps these moments to a minimum. 

 The first three settings are solid vibration speeds followed by two functions---a crescendo and a pulse. I've never been a fan of functions, and always prefer steady speeds, so I don't have much to comment about on the functions.  When it comes to the speeds, the distance between low and medium is a nice interval, but I barely notice a difference between the medium and high function, which comes up just a wee too short. 



I found a couple of things that worked for me with this toy. Using the Splendor on my clit as an extension of my index finger---combining the motions of what I would do with my hand---made for great session, despite its mild vibe power. I've tried to do this with other toys but it generally overstimulates me. It's skinniness makes it easy to pinpoint spots, where fatter toys, or wands, generally sort of just smush everything all together.

  
The added firmness and smoothness heightened my normal hand routine, the hardness of the toy allowed for extra pressure and the point increased my precision. The handle, which is a little oddly shaped worked well for this technique. Placing the handle between my middle finger and ring finger (kind of like holding a chopstick) kept it super stable.  I took a liking to the toy using it Splendor this way. It's the kind of toy that makes a pleasant addition to a mid-afternoon nap. 


I'm not a big fan of internal vibrations, but not against them entirely. The Splendor is super slender which makes it easy to insert without dragging and/or pinching, but, at the same time, its super thin and can't  curb a craving for that fullness I generally want from a vaginal toy. 

 Using the Splendor internally in combination with another vibe on my clitoris worked well. In short, it makes an ok back-up singer to a more powerful clit toy. 
All in all, my time with the Splendor was pleasant and pleasurable. Though its by no means life-altering or a must have, overall the Splendor made a positive impression on me. 
You can find it on Amazon








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