May 1997 feature by Emily Way |
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In Search of Some Decent Porn
I like messing with people's stereotypes. I'm a feminist, and
I like sex. I think sex and depictions of it are cool. I think
adults should be allowed and even encouraged to seek out
representations of stuff that turns them on, and use these words or
images to liven up their own sex lives, alone or with a consenting
partner. The world would be a much better place if more people got
laid regularly and well, and fewer people tried to control how everyone
else gets off.
I know this subject is a minefield among feminists, who are
(surprise!) a diverse group - some would probably deny that I
am one because I don't think that a picture of a woman having sex is
somehow inherently demeaning to all women. But I've read as much Andrea
Dworkin as I could stand, as she seems to be some sort of hero to
the anti-smut types, and I just can't get my head around her wild
generalizations about how women are inherently victims because of the
way our parts are shaped, and how it's in men's nature to treat women
as objects. I know a lot of good, kind, decent men - I live with one
and I was raised by one, for starters - and claims like "Men are
distinguished from women by their commitment to do violence rather than
to be victimized by it" and "pornography is the orchestrated
destruction of women's bodies and souls" just reek of self-serving
oversimplification and victim culture. Yeah, some men are pigs, some
are sadists, some are assholes who have a big problem with women, but
most of them are just regular people who are smart enough to know the
difference between a picture and the real thing.
I find that the feminism of people such as Canadian writer Donna Laframboise
and ACLU president Nadine Strossen feels a whole lot more right
to me than anything coming from someone who tells me what kind of sex I
should like. I get a kick out of seeing Laframboise's catalog of
dirty scenes from women's romance fiction, proving that women can be
just as kinky and turned on by power games as men, and I think it's
great that she shows how the Canadian government wastes time and tax
money censoring issues of Penthouse magazine on their way
into the country. Penthouse isn't my thing, but who am I
to tell another adult what's an acceptable turn-on and what isn't?
After digging around in lots of porn-related theory for a while, I
decided it was time to find something that turned me on. So my
sweetie and I went to the local video shop, the one with the opaque
windows, and looked around for a flick or two to rent.
You'd think that in a place full of hundreds of videos, we'd be able to
find something to get us hot, no?
But - and here's the bummer for us pro-porn, relatively straight
feminists - mainstream porn rots. It wets its nest. It stars
vacant-looking big-haired women wearing cheap ridiculous lingerie and
spike heels, their faces (and nipples!) caked in makeup, their breasts
replaced by big ugly spherical rocks, most of their pubic hair shaved
and the rest trimmed meticulously into shapes that too often resemble
racing stripes. The costars are mostly slack-jawed, scrawny,
dorky-looking guys with big dicks and all the sex appeal of the
assistant manager at KMart, and they don't even bother to take off
their baseball caps or gym socks. Yummy. Ron Jeremy is one of porn's
most famous "actors" - in case you don't know of him, he's this
disgusting little man with a furry potbelly. A Web page dedicated to
him tells me that his nickname is "the Hedgehog," that he's charming
and amusing, and that he's made more than 1,000 films. Well, he might
be the nicest guy in the world, but I'd have died a bit happier if I'd
never seen him naked.
And not only are the people in porn movies generally pretty skanky,
but the production values stink in many of them, too. The camera is
shaky, the lighting is terrible, the sound quality is nonexistent, the
editing is jerky and abrupt. We rented one supposedly artistic
collection of short European flicks, in which the subtitle "Turn
around, you bitch" stayed on the screen through the last third of the
Hungarian segment and well into the French one that followed. There
are some production houses such as Vivid and Wicked that can be counted
on for well-made movies, but their stuff has mostly the same people and
the same kind of sex as all the other porn flicks, just with better
sound and lighting. ("Improved Malibu Stacy! Now with a NEW HAT!")
And then there's the sex. Sex in porn films reflects the fantasies
of some horny virgin teenage boy who wouldn't know what to do for a
real live woman if she sat on his face. It's all hopelessly vanilla,
with a discouragingly predictable sequence: he licks her, she licks
him, she mounts him, pump pump pump, he mounts her, pump pump pump,
they change position again, pump pump pump, they change position again,
maybe he takes her up the bunghole, pump pump pump, yippee, and then he
pulls out of whatever orifice he's in for the sake of the inevitable
cum shot. I hate the cum shot. I know there are some guys out
there who like to pull out Mr. Happy and squirt jiz all over everything
(are they marking their territory?), but I hate seeing it so much that
I gag. Literally. Does it have to be every single guy, every
single time? Oh yeah, and hardly anybody in porn movies uses condoms.
Maybe I'm too much a child of the '80s, but unprotected sex does not
turn me on, it freaks me out.
And the presentation, and the marketing! These things are so
obviously made by and marketed toward men it's almost comical. Even in
the higher-quality films, the camera almost never shows the sex act
from the woman's point of view. The women are the HOTT BABEZ; cute men
are the exception, not the rule (and you know the cute ones would
rather be making gay flicks, anyway). And the titles of so many of
these videos just make me laugh. Cum Sluts 13.
Girls Who Like to Fuck Other Girls. Backdoor
Babysitters. Dildo Debutantes. I saw one
all-girl video for rent the other night that advertised itself as
"ball-draining." I guess it never occurred to you that your viewers
might want some female companionship when watching your masterwork, huh
boys? Or even (heaven forbid) that a woman might want to watch it
alone to get herself off? Nah, I didn't think so.
I visited Amsterdam last summer. I'd been hearing for years about
how much smut there is there, and I had really been hoping that a difference
in quantity would mean a difference in quality, or at least that there
would be stuff with real-looking people actually communicating about
sex ("I like it [moving hand] here") and not pulling out for the
cum shot. Maybe even something shot from the woman's perspective.
Girl stuff. Not some "Cinemax After Dark" gauzy backlit fantasy, but real
porn for real chyx.
Amsterdam is indeed stunningly blatant about sex. In the Red Light
District, there are big porn shops everywhere. They are usually
painted hot pink and black, and inside there are a lot of mirrors,
which don't help make the space feel any less cramped. Every shop has
floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall sex toys and magazines and videos,
videos, videos catering to a much larger audience than smut merchants
in the US and Canada do. There are sections for straight and gay
vanilla stuff, bondage, watersports, bestiality (I did not need to know
that there was a film out there called Two Men and a Cow),
and and and. Yet I got exactly the same message I get in North
American porn shops: this stuff is for men, not for you. Even
worse, the clip I saw when I went into one of the little video booths
and dropped some Dutch change into the box was just the same as the
worst stuff I've seen in North America - I could almost hear the director
saying, "Okay, enough of that position, Tawnee, you get on top now." I
don't think my reaction was the one the moviemakers intended.
All was not lost, however, as I realized when I found the few sex
shops run by women. Notably, they were all outside the Red Light
District. They didn't look like sex shops from the outside.
They didn't on the inside, either, except that the products that were
so artfully arranged in neat, well-lit displays were vibrators and
dildoes and paddles and leather bras and latex bodices. The videos -
there were only a few of them - were discreetly displayed on a
bookshelf. Most of them were by Candida Royalle, who used to perform
in porn movies but now writes and directs them. Royalle is known for
making "couples" movies that have a sense of humor and don't always
have a cum shot. I'd have bought one, but they were expensive, and I
didn't know how much trouble I'd have getting it through Customs when I
got home. I haven't seen any of her stuff since. Sigh.
Amsterdam made me feel both relieved and sad. Relieved, in that
there's a place on Earth where women's sexuality is accepted and
marketed to, if only on a small scale, where it's easy to talk to
salespeople about sex toys and not impossible to find sexually
explicit material that doesn't assume a male audience; and sad that
most of it is still so male-dominated and the stuff that isn't is so far
away from where I live.
Not being able to find dirty movies that I like yet hasn't
completely discouraged me. I'm going to keep looking for those
Candida Royalle videos, and reading Susie Bright, and poking through the Adult
Video News and the FAQ for rec.arts.movies.erotica to try to
make the trips to the video store a little more useful, and doing what
I can to convince the pornmaking Boys' Club to quit screwing over women
like Brandy
Alexandre when they try to make porn movies too.
So what do I want when I rent a porn video? I want well-made movies
with attractive, real-looking people who turn each other on. I want
real scenarios ("Gee, I don't have enough money for the pizza" isn't
good enough). I want good music and a sense of humor. I want real
breasts and crotches that have never seen a razor. I want the woman's
perspective. Sometimes I want the woman to dominate. I want condoms
and lube. I want to see sex that looks like the sex I have.
Hey, boys, I'm a target market. Market to me.
back to the junk drawer
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