What, exactly, is 'feminist porn'?
Toronto just hosted the Feminist Porn Awards, and even female adult-film directors aren't sure if that term is an oxymoron
"Feminist porn" is a thing. It's enough of a thing that it has its own awards ceremony, the Good For Her Feminist Porn Awards, which wrapped up this past weekend in Toronto, along with a first-ever Feminist Porn Conference, which focuses on a new scholarly tome, The Feminist Porn Book. Feminist porn is such an established pastime that the Toronto ceremony was the eighth annual Feminist Porn Awards.
But the clarity on this subject sort of stops there. Pornography is comparatively easy to define — "I'll know it when I see it," Justice Potter Stewart famously said of hard-core porn in 1964. But feminism still (or increasingly) means different things to different people. Some feminists consider feminist porn an oxymoron, others just think it's moronic. The Feminist Porn Awards bills itself as the "longest-running celebration of erotica focused on women and marginalized people," for example, while Laura Balbi at Italy's Cinema Fanpage calls it "the Oscars of women's pleasure" ("gli Oscar per il piacere delle donne").
So, what is feminist porn? First, a bit of history. "There was a time, not too long ago, when the idea of making porn for women was unthinkable," says Tracy Clark-Flory at Salon. Then, beginning in the 1980s, directors like Candida Royalle started proving that men aren't the only ones who watch porn. Over the next few decades, more people began catching on:
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Even today, Clark-Flory acknowledges, what comprises feminist porn isn't "entirely resolved." That's where The Feminist Porn Book comes in. "One of the things we felt really strongly about is that there is no single answer, which I think is appropriate because there is no single response to, 'How do you define feminism?'," one of the book's four editors, Tristan Taormino, tells Clark-Flory. Slightly more helpfully, Taormino — who is also an adult-filmmaker — offers a "broad definition" of feminist porn in the book:
She explains it a little more colorfully, and less academically, in an interview with Current TV's Joy Behar (watch below). But basically, according to Taormino, feminist porn is typically humane porn that captures more normal-looking women in more normal sexual encounters, with a focus on a woman's sexual pleasure.
Oh, please, says Tanya Gold at Britain's The Guardian. Sometimes "I wonder if third-wave feminism was born in the Playboy Mansion, where it fell out of a cake and opened its mouth." It's bad enough you can't even speak of limiting violent, hard-core porn in polite company, but the icing on the cake is "the current lie" that "watching, or making, pornography is an inherently feminist act."
Gold cedes that, yes, "there is good porn," including a handful of artsy feminist pornographers, but not all "so-called feminist porn" is respectful of women, and there's not enough of the "righteous and even lovely" female-oriented porn to outweigh the bad. Ultimately "I fear that 'feminist porn' is less a movement with momentum than a marketing tool that will eventually be stolen by the mainstream, its nemesis."
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Adult-film director Nica Noelle says at The Huffington Post that she too has a hard time pinning down the term, adding that feminist porn seems to be overlooking another important fact: To the extent that it exists, "'feminist porn' has a dirty little secret." The reason that female porn directors have "ascended and our movies now often dominate sales charts, is largely the support of — brace yourselves — men."
These feminist debates over porn have been going on for decades, Taormino tells Salon. But, still, "we're getting somewhere." And much of that has to do with the fact that people are talking about feminist porn and what it means.
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Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.
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