THE words “feminist” and “porn” do not sit easily together, although Scottish Queer International Film Festival’s third annual “feminist porn night” is testimony to a wave of women directors who are trying to take the misogyny out of porn and put the female empowerment in.
This Friday will see it host a screening of Enactone, a gay vampire porn film that scooped best feature at the Berlin Porn Film festival earlier this year. The film's director, Sky Deep, is one of an increasing number of women creating erotica featuring the kind of sex they like to see and the kind of women they are. Not only does Deep, a black fortysomething woman, appear in it, but she acts out her fantasies, what she describes as “Sky’s pervy dream”, involving lots of lesbian sex and wild, vampiric blood-sucking.
READ MORE: Porn by numbers
One in three women, according to a 2015 Marie Claire survey watch porn at least once a week, but many of the women surveyed felt conflicted about porn. Among the top reasons for this were that did not like the way the industry treats women, and that they found the options too “male-centric”. These feminist porn-makers say they hope to meet an appetite, while also attempting to create a kind of fairtrade of the adult entertainment world, in which consent is transparent, and working conditions are good.
Among the movement's big names are women like Barcelona-based Erika Lust, a graduate in political science and gender studies from the University of Lund, Sweden, who, in a 2014 TedX talk [a series about technology, entertainment and design], made a rallying call to get more women into the porn industry.
"Everywhere,” she said, “the role of women is under debate – everywhere, except in the porn industry. It’s time for porn to change and for that we need women."
READ MORE: Porn by numbers
Or there’s American filmmaker Tristan Taormino, who has been creating movies since 2000 and organised the first ever Feminist Porn Conference. She wants to see feminist porn being “ethically produced” and says it “seeks to empower the performers who make it and the people who watch it”.
Not everyone, however, believes it’s even possible to make pornography that is feminist. UK Feminista founder Kat Banyard, in her book Pimp State, describes feminist porn as “not a foe of the mainstream industry” but “a friend”.
“Financially it’s a brand,” she writes, “that could help the consumer base, hooking in customers who might previously have felt a bit awkward about clicking on Watch Me, Bitch, for instance. Politically, as a brand, it’s an alibi …”
It performs, she believes, a “feministwashing” role for the industry.
Frequently these feminist filmmakers are trying to portray the kind of sex they feel is missing in the mainstream porn that is pitched predominantly at men – what they view as real sex, in all its variety. Helen Wright, programmer for Scottish Queer International Festival (SQIF), explains why the festival hosts these feminist porn nights. “It’s about reclaiming how LGBT are represented,” she says.
Enactone not only presents queer sex, it also tackles head-on the issue of race politics by making its central character, a vampire, who was formerly a US slave who died in a lynching in 1914. Particularly remarkable is the fact that 43-year-old Deep had never appeared in a porn film before. Hers is a body we don’t see very often on film – black, overweight – let alone mainstream porn films, and one of the reasons, she says, she chose to “put herself out there” was because she really wasn’t seeing “people like me”.
READ MORE: Porn by numbers
Deep credits the fact that she was inspired to make this film because of the Berlin scene she found herself in when she moved there from the US. “I felt like I was 14 again. I was out with some of my new friends and I said, ‘Oh my gosh I have to make a vampire movie. No matter what. I don’t care if it’s on my camera-phone.” And my very good friend said, ‘Yeah, you should make a vampire porn'.” The resulting film was, she says, “a community effort”.
Deep didn’t set out to make a feminist porn film. “It’s just,” she says, “that my world is queer and black feminism.”
Like many feminist porn directors, Deep declares an interest in watching and making films that convey what she considers to be “real depictions of real sex”.
As she puts it, “I’m really into eroticism. I’m kind of romantic. I need a story. I need some aesthetics. And I need people to look like they’re really actually enjoying it.”
Her words are echoed by Erika Lust, who when interviewed in the documentary Hot Girls Wanted, said, “When I look at regular mainstream porn it’s not good enough for me. I want something more. I want emotion. I want passion. I want intimacy. I want to feel with them …”
One of the big problems she had with mainstream porn, she said, was that “the people creating it are more interested in punish-f***ing women than showing a good sexual encounter”.
READ MORE: Porn by numbers
SQIF programmer Helen Wright recognises the tensions for feminists around pornography. “There are,” she says, “certainly obvious problems with a lot of pornography in that it’s anti-feminist in the sense of portraying warped versions of women, and that’s particularly in the mainstream of heterosexual porn.” However, she observes the importance of providing a physical space for people to come together and talk about it safely.
Feminist porn, of course, isn’t a new concept. The movement has long been developing and the first Feminist Porn awards took place 11 years ago. Chanelle Gallant, a founder of the awards, recalls, “We wanted to see that marginalised people in the porn industry, especially women, were having a good time, getting to express the full range of their sexuality and exerting control over what got made. I still think those are pretty decent aspirations.”
Now, however, she looks back and says that there was something missing from their vision: workers' rights. A good starting place, she believes, might have been in tying feminist porn to “sex-worker movements for fair working conditions, industry standards, decent pay and control over their image”.
But even then, it's likely that many feminists will remain unconvinced. Among them is Gail Dines, author of Pornland, who has said of Erika Lust, "Just like the boys, [she] is making money from sexually exploiting women; unlike the boys, she wraps herself in a feminist flag as a way to differentiate her brand in a glutted market."
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