Making it better?
Josey Vogels
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Me and Tristan Taormino making history
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When I first started writing this column 12 years ago, porn and feminism weren't exactly fond of each other. "Pornography is the theory. Rape is the practice," was the line being toed by anti-porn crusaders Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon.
Part of the reason I started my column was that I wasn't quite comfortable toeing that line. After all, I was a feminist but I watched porn. And I liked some of it.
So it was with great excitement that I found myself on stage two weeks ago at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto at the very first Feminist Porn Awards, presenting the inaugural award for Best Anal Adventure to Tristan Taormino for her film House of Ass.
"Here's to someone who gets it," I beamed with pride as I handed Tristan her Emma award, a glass buttplug mounted on a trophy stand named after Canadian pro-sex feminist pioneer Emma Goldman.
The mood of the 300-strong crowd that evening was practically giddy as Emmas for Best Smutty Schoolteacher (Betty Dodson for her educational film Orgasmic Women), Fiercest Female Orgasm (Nina Hartley's Guide to Double Penetration), Indie Porn Producer (Dana Dane of Erocktavision) and Lifetime Achievement in Women's Erotica (Candida Royalle) were awarded to the crème de la crème of smut for girls.
What exactly is feminist porn?
According to the founders of the awards, Good For Her, a women-oriented sex shop in Toronto (goodforher.com), the winning films had to meet three criteria: a) they had to show genuine female pleasure (in other words, no
faking it); b) they had to be directed or produced by a woman; and c) they had to "expand the range of female sexual expression currently seen in porn."Oh, and they had to be hot.
Made perfect sense to me. Porn has traditionally been a male-dominated industry. Celebrating the fact that women have made any inroads at all seemed like a no-brainer.
Still, put "women" and "porn" in the same sentence and you're bound to get a few people's knickers in a twist.
Some reactions were a scary throwback to those lovely backlash days in the early '90s when feminists were branded "man-hating feminazis."
On the weekly radio segment I do on The Edge in Toronto, the three male hosts made jokes about how the award ceremony would undoubtedly be just a bunch of hairy-legged lesbians who "are probably ugly."
Nice.
Some reactions were slightly more indifferent, along the lines of, "Lots of women watch porn. Nothing new. Why do they need their own awards?"
And, not surprisingly, a few of the old anti-porn feminist arguments reared their heads. "All porn objectifies women and calling it 'feminist' doesn't change that," one woman said to me.
"Oh lovely, now we have something called 'Feminist Porn,'" wrote another woman on a forum about the awards on Feministing.com. "What's next, 'The Battered Wife of the Year Awards'? Or maybe 'The Proud to be Degraded Festival for Young Feminists'?"
I think putting feminist porn in the same category as battered women is a bit much, but I do think she raises an interesting point.
Is "feminist porn" an oxymoron?
Not for Tristan Taormino, who, in a panel on feminism and porn right before the awards, described her definition of feminist porn.
"It's all about creating a fair working environment and empowering everyone involved - both men and women - to have a say in the representation of their sexuality rather than simply having me tell them what to do."
Fair-trade porn, if you will.
Good For Her manager Chanelle Gallant believes that "good porn is a human right," and says feminist porn is all about creating "sexual images that make us feel good about ourselves and about sex."
Still, as some of the women on the Feministing.com forum argued, no matter who creates the images and how much the women in these films get off, the majority of porn consumers are still men getting off on images of women, feminist or not.
The only beneficiaries of these awards, one woman wrote, will be "1) the mainstream porn industry, thanks to the positive exposure of porn, and 2) the massively male majority of pornography consumers who will now be watching 'fetish' films depicting a 'feminist' taking it up the ass."
Hmmm... she might be right that feminist porn may never reach mainstream status, but it's clear to me from the letters I get from people looking for porn that "speaks to them," as one reader recently put it, that women (and yes, some guys too) desire an alternative.
And simply throwing up your hands and saying that creating it won't change the big picture is cynical and kinda sad.
Not every woman has to like porn or even support its existence. I just think that the women who do deserve something better.
As someone at the awards said: "The answer to bad porn isn't no porn, it's better porn."
Wow, I don't think I've ever posted a comment on Josey's articles before, but after seeing some of these responses, I felt more than a little compelled to stand up for her. I mean, with comments like "next to porn is rape" and "I feel sorry for Josey Vogels who thinks that there is nothing wrong with pornography", it's just amazing the amount of bullshit that some people spew out here. I mean, come on people, get out of your fucking caves and join the 21st century. Okay, maybe you don't approve of pornography, that's fine and dandy, you're entitled to your beliefs, but you don't have to be a fucking asshole and look down your nose at someone that has an open mind about it. Seriously. The only disgusting thing that I found in Josey's article were the condescending comments made by a couple of self-righteous pricks. The end.
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Raymond Lemoine
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{4 votes}
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A Feminist Porn Award in the shape of a glass buttplug mounted on a trophy stand called an Emma? An Emma?! Enema? Oh. come on, I can't be the only one that caught that one, can I?
~
It's great that women want to take back porn but c'mon, it's friggin' porn! Maybe the emphasis is loftier but in the end it still comes down to getting down. By the by, if you really want to talk about female oriented and produced porn there's any number of starlets in the business that are already making headway in that direction. Jill Kelly and Tera Patrick come to mind...
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Pedro Eggers
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{4 votes}
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| Smut by any other word is still smut |
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Porn from a female point of view is still porn.There is no good porn and bad porn.There is no way you can disguise pornography and make it look decent whether it is a man or a woman who is shouting out ACTION.Watching obscenities can be may be exciting to some but the majority of us would rather watch an intelligently constructed love scene that requires more skill and talent .
If women see this sort of smut as progress I truly feel sorry for them.I feel sorry for Josey Vogels who thinks that there is nothing wrong with pornography.
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Mary Libby Talevi
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{14 votes}
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Feminist porn sounds incredibly hot to me. Although I'm far from a connisseur of smut, it seems to me that a lot of today's mainstream male-produced porn has become perfunctory, paint-by-numbers affairs with the emphasis placed on the gratification of the male viewing audience. Something that is produced by women for women with genuine emotion (read : pleasure) involved sounds like both an alluring and welcome departure from this staid state of affairs. Props to women for empowering themselves and celebrating their successes in this new and burgeoning field!
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Mark St Pierre
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{6 votes}
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| You need to balance out you hormones if you have a need for porn. |
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What can we say about all this. Porn supporters are obviousely sick people and it seems that the desease has now spread into the femal sector.I believe that any market of the flech for the perpose of sexual arousal is sick. I don't believe in sex . The act of love making is totally different for having sex . If you have a need to participate or or watch porn you have crossed over the line of being normal and you need medical help. Perhaps you need to balance out you hormones because you should not have to use porn to live a happy and healthy and satisfying life style. I do believe that next to porn is rape and that is criminal.
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Maria Cecillia Silva
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{8 votes}
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