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Good Porn
A Woman's Guide
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By Erika Lust
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Porn. Do you think of it as a dirty word, a taboo topic, something you associate with cheesy films with bad plots? Filmmaker and author Erika Lust is here to change all that.
With the goal of making porn more accessible to women, Good Porn examines the films, the industry, and the phenomenon. It breaks away from any assumptions you may have about porn, opening the door for a wholly new conversation about a medium that has too long been considered the domain of men. Come on in, ladies . . . the water’s just fine.
Excerpt
PREFACE
In the beginning, porn struck me the same way it strikes most women. It was anything but love at first sight. Obviously, there was something about the images that turned me on, but there were also a lot of things that bothered me.
I couldn't see myself in those films—not my lifestyle or my values, and not my sexuality. They didn't portray female pleasure at all, and the women in those movies existed for one reason alone—to pleasure the men. The sexual situations were ridiculous, too, based on male fantasies. (For example, a girl comes home and catches her guy in bed with her best friend, but instead of getting mad, she decides to hop in and join the party.)
Not only that, people my age had grown up with MTV, so we found adult films' production values totally unacceptable. The cheesy sets, the awful styling and makeup, the insipid music, the laughable performances (with sound editing that was even worse), and the amateurish cinematography—it all made for a very inferior product.
And the men making adult films back then expected their audiences to put up with female stereotypes that had already been offending modern women for a good twenty years. I soon had my fill of horny Lolitas, kinky teenagers, fuck bunnies constantly in the mood, desperate women, hot nurses, nympho hookers, and semen-slugging heroines. Women like these may have represented the feminine sexual ideal for guys, but they left me cold. Then there were the male characters—almost all of them were Mafia dons, pimps, drug lords, arms dealers, bazillionaires, or sickly muscled sex machines hung like a horse. For guys, maybe, these men were sexual heroes, but they didn't do a thing for me.
So I had my criticisms of the adult film genre, as you can see. But even though I didn't like what I was seeing, something inside me was pushing me to look deeper. I discovered that there were quite a few feminist intellectuals who also hated porn, but they hadn't stopped there. They had gone on to analyze it as a contemporary cultural phenomenon. Two books by Linda Williams, Hard Core and Porn Studies, inspired me. After reading them, I decided to become a porn producer and director myself. I understood that a different kind of porn was possible, and that women had a great deal to contribute to a genre that had always been the exclusive province of men.
Today there are a lot of us out there—women who like watching well-made films that include sexually explicit content, even though we've so often been disappointed by efforts to make such films. But some of us have kept our eyes open while swimming against the tide, and we've become what we might call "wise wankers"—women who know what we want, and what we don't.
In this book, I want to be your guide to the intricate world of adult films. Together we'll discover how to take some chances with this controversial genre, and how to approach it without losing our feminine critical eye. We have to be able to enjoy ourselves without feeling insulted.
Have fun!
ENJOY!
WOMEN'S VOICES
Eliza
It blows my mind how awful the music in porn films is! Lots of times I just turn the volume all the way down and put my own sound track on. And they take two hours to tell these completely ridiculous stories—I can't stand it. But the worst are the remakes—Gladiator X, Mission Possible, Charlie's Sex Angels. Instead of making you horny, they just crack you up.
Violet Blue (www.tinynibbles.com)
Mostly, porn should be fun, hot, wankable. But I think it can be pretty liberating, too. Set yourself up to challenge anti-porn pundits and sex-negative points of view by becoming a clever consumer armed with self-knowledge about porn's positive effects on your own sex life. We need to break down cultural myths about porn's degradation of women and its mythical ability to cause rape and child molestation, and to create "porn addicts."
Angelica
Why are the guys in pornographic movies such fat, short, ignorant assholes? And they're always pushing themselves on pretty girls! It's not like that in real life. But if the point is to tell lies, then why can't we see plain Janes hooking up with hot guys, or much younger boys? Take any pornographic movie, and the casting will reek of male chauvinism.
Candida Royalle (www.candidaroyalle.com)
It seemed to me that most porn was sex-negative and did not present a woman's point of view or show what women liked sexually. At the same time I could tell women were becoming more curious and felt permission to explore their sexuality. . . . I saw a challenging new market.
Karina
Lots of my women friends give me a hard time because I'm always saying how much I adore the blonde bombshells in American porn—those tall, curvy chicks with their tigress fingernails. I don't know why, but they turn me on. Probably because there aren't any women like that around here, or because those women are like a cartoon version of sexuality. A good example is Jenna Jameson before she turned anorexic. What I don't like, though, is how they're dressed and made up to look like whores. I'd rather see them in jeans and a T-shirt, wearing Converse sneakers instead of six-inch spike heels.
Tristan Taormino (www.puckerup.com)
Porn has always been, and continues to be, a huge issue for women. I don't know if the debate will ever be over. But it's hard to hear from other feminists. They haven't seen my porn, they haven't seen Candida Royalle or Belladonna. So they don't see that porn is not one monolithic thing that's all bad.
Anna
I want real plots, believable characters, and ordinary people I can identify with. In most of these movies, the guys are Mafia kingpins, drug dealers, multimillionaires, prison guards . . . tough guys who treat girls like sex toys. I never see myself! I want to see real men, men like my friends, men who treat women like equals, with love and respect.
Rebecca
Porn is like a guy who's a libertine, but sexist and conservative. He doesn't mind asking you and another woman to put on a show for him, but if you so much as suggest that he let another man touch him, he's shocked, as if you'd asked him to kill somebody.
Erika Lust (www.erikalust.com)
I belong to a generation whose modern, diverse sexuality is not represented in traditional male-oriented pornography. We women need to take steps now to start changing the views of sex that men have been putting out there through porn. If we don't, then future generations won't have anything but that diminished, impoverished vision of sexuality.
CHAPTER 1
PORN FOR MEN
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE MEN WHO PRODUCE AND DIRECT PORNOGRAPHIC FILMS
Gentlemen:
The time has come to admit what we all know. For decades you've had a monopoly on defining what porn is, and you've been making adult films that express your own ideas, desires, and fantasies. The porn that now infests the world represents your sexuality and yours alone.
But the time has come for you to open your private, secret world to women. In politics, we've already managed to crash the party. Now we want access to your private preserve, and as soon as we get in, we're going to want some changes. Because we are not happy. We are not satisfied.
When I decided to start making erotic and sexually explicit films especially for women, you guys in the industry accused me of being outmoded and backward. You told me it was discriminatory to make films just for women. You said you were already making movies that were for everyone.
But that's not true. Your films are male-oriented, and in this world of ours, whatever is male-oriented becomes the standard, so it never occurred to you that something might be missing. You thought everybody on the planet liked what you like. It's the same as when a school holds a parents' night, but the only parents who show up are mothers, or when only the word "mankind" is used to talk about humanity as a whole.
These days, women directors are popping up all over the world. When we talk about making films for women, it's not because we want to exclude men from our audiences. We're just pointing out that our movies are made with a female audience in mind, and that the focus of our movies is female pleasure and desire—which basically proves that your own films aren't primarily intended for women.
So what are you afraid of? Instead of circling the wagons and trying to keep us out, why not take a look at our films? If you watch our movies, maybe you'll understand how we see things. Maybe you'll even like them, the same way many of us like male-oriented porn.
Wouldn't it be great if we really had free choice and could take our pick of female- or male-oriented films? These days we can go to a newsstand and buy male- or female-oriented magazines, whether we're men or women, and whether we're gay, lesbian, or transgender. But when it comes to pornographic films, the only ones we can get are yours, and yours are one-dimensional and all the same.
Lucía Etxebarría is one of my favorite Spanish writers, and her latest book is an anthology that she edited. It's called If Men Only Knew . . . Women Talk About Sex. Here's what she has to say in her magnificent preface: "It's no accident that in commercial sex films intended for male audiences—that is, porn—women are almost always portrayed as things, as victims. The camera may linger fondly over the man's ejaculation, but the same attention is rarely paid to the woman's sexual enjoyment." She goes on to say that "pornographic films in general are produced and directed by men and intended for male audiences, so they're tightly focused on a handful of highly specific codes—objectifying and humiliating women, and always keeping male pleasure front and center."1
Etxebarría is right, and what she's saying is something I discovered for myself. At one time, way back before I even thought about starting Lust Films, I was doing audiovisual production work for advertising and films, including pornographic films. One big distribution and production company where I worked wanted to launch a new line for women, or at least that's what they said. But they had the bright idea of putting a man in charge of it, and of course the project was a huge flop. That was my first contact with the porn industry, and I quickly realized that this was a world controlled by men who were not really all that professional. I also realized that I had quite a lot to say, and quite a lot to give, to young people today, and especially to other women.
But the problem is not just that the porn industry is controlled by men. It's the kind of men they are. To be specific, these men are unhip, anti-feminist, anti-intellectual, and unenlightened. There are exceptions, obviously, but most of these men are pretty dumb. And they're all pretty much alike. As I got to know the men in the adult film business, I came to understand why their movies are so indistinguishable. There's no racial or sociocultural diversity among these producers and directors. And because they're all alike, they all think alike. They're mostly middle-aged straight white guys, and their taste in women runs to big-breasted horny blonde airheads. It just stands to reason that a homogenous group is going to create a homogenous product.
I've actually seen screenplays less than three pages long for porn films that lasted an hour. The writers used maybe six words for the typical scene: "BLONDE fucks BLACK GUY in KITCHEN." And for the rest of the scenes, they just substituted different words for the words in caps.
The men who make traditional pornographic films think that set decoration is all about ancient Rome and spaceships, and that locations are about shooting in some palatial house on the Costa Azul or in the Seychelles. That's how they make a new movie look different from the one that came before. As far as I'm concerned, though, this is just a bunch of boring male fantasy, or maybe it's nothing but an excuse for the producers and directors to travel. But we women can just have our film shoots in a loft, or on a bed. We're not trying to impress anybody with our luxury cars or jet skis. When we want to impress people, we can point to our actors' performances, or our screenplays, or the rhythms of our plots, or the quality of the sex.
The new films that women are making for women are all about intimacy and relationships. The films that men make are about ass fucking and ejaculations. From the very beginnings of the porn industry, men have had a stranglehold on how we define porn and how we think about it. But it's our turn now, mine and other women's, to redefine what porn can and must be—for us.
| ♂ IN PORN FOR MEN . . . | ♀ IN PORN FOR WOMEN . . . |
|---|---|
| Oral Sex | |
| Deep Throat-style | Cunnilingus |
| blow jobs | |
| Setting | |
| A luxurious mansion | A modern apartment |
| Male Characters | |
| Mafia kingpins, drug dealers, spies, soldiers, jailers | Typical guys like the ones you know |
| Female Characters | |
| Blonde hookers, nymphomaniacs, lesbians who fuck guys, secret agents/hired killers, kinky teenagers | Typical modern women who have jobs and are sexually liberated—women like you and your friends |
| Technology and Transportation | |
| Sports cars, jet skis, helicopters, private jets | iPhones, Macs, Minis, Vespas |
| Beliefs and Attitudes | |
| Girls are always in the mood; deep down, women enjoy rape | Sex has to be earned (she doesn't spread her legs just because he asks her to), and it has to be consensual |
| Women's Costumes | |
| Net stockings; a miniskirt fit for a hooker; a skimpy top; ridiculous high heels or platform shoes | A sexy Miss Sixty, Armani, or Mango dress; jeans and a T-shirt |
STRANGE BUT TRUE
It's not just the adult film business that shuts women out. We're noticeably scarce in the audiovisual industry as a whole. Only one woman has won an Oscar for best director (Kathryn Bigelow, 2010), and only four women have ever been nominated—not because women's movies aren't good enough, but because almost no women are making movies. We don't get the high-level jobs in the industry, so we don't get the same opportunities men enjoy. For more of this kind of information, check out the Guerrilla Girls (www.guerillagirls.com). (At least in the future billboards like the one featured below will be able to claim a single female win for Best Director!)
IN THE PHONY, PREDICTABLE PORN MADE BY MEN . . .
1. Women wear spike heels to bed.
2. Men can always get it up.
3. When a man goes down on a woman, ten seconds is more than enough for her.
4. If a woman is masturbating and a man she doesn't know walks in on her, she's never afraid or embarrassed. She just invites him to have sex with her.
5. Men always shoot a pint or more.
6. When a man is choking a woman with his dick, she always smiles and enjoys it.
7. Beautiful young women just love to have sex with fat, ugly, middle-aged men.
8. Men and women always come at the exact same instant.
9. A blow job can fix a traffic ticket or settle any kind of debt.
10. Every woman screams like a banshee when she comes.
11. All women have big beautiful boobs, and all men have big beautiful cocks.
12. Double penetration feels good to a woman and makes her beam with delight.
13. Asian men do not exist.
14. Men with small dicks also do not exist.
15. If you should run across a couple fucking in a park or in the woods, go ahead and shove your dick into the girl's mouth—the guy won't beat the crap out of you.
16. Every woman loves to get fucked in the ass.
17. Nurses always suck their patients' cocks.
18. Men always pull out before they come.
19. If your wife or girlfriend discovers you in bed with her best friend, she'll be mad for a second or two, but then she'll decide to make it a threesome.
20. A woman never has a headache, and she never gets her period.
21. Women enjoy dressing up like whores or little girls.
22. When a woman is sucking a man's cock, it's important for him to give her constant reminders about what to do: "Oh yeah—suck it!"
23. Butts are always squeaky-clean and tasty, and a woman loves to pull a dick out of her butt and pop it right into her mouth.
24. A woman is always pleasantly surprised when she unzips a man's pants and discovers a dick in there.
25. Even when she's being raped, a woman always shouts, "Yes! Yes! Harder!" Every woman secretly wants to be raped.
26. Every lesbian is tall, thin, and pretty and has long hair and nails.
27. Men never have to ask, of course, because every woman is always in the mood for a good fuck.
CHAPTER 2
WOMEN, FEMINISM, AND PORNOGRAPHY
QUESTIONS
Should women watch porn?
Adult films seem like a genre that women should hate, one that women have traditionally been expected to hate. But should we challenge that cliché? Can you be a feminist as well as someone who likes porn, or are the two incompatible?
Is porn depraved, or can it help us learn about sexuality?
Does porn turn us into porn addicts, or can it help us have more fun in bed?
Is porn dirty? Does it kill desire, or can it fire up the libido?
Do we need to fight and censor porn, or should we participate in this male-oriented phenomenon to change it and shape it to our own tastes?
ANSWERS
One thing is for sure—as a group, we women haven't had much time to exercise our right to enjoy our bodies and our sexuality. Remember, even today there are cultures that are still using barbaric practices like clitoridectomy to nip female sexual desire in the bud.
Not so long ago, women's sexuality was powerfully conditioned—or repressed—by society, the patriarchy, the church, puritan moralism, and even training in female subservience, which some girls got at home. These institutions, all dominated by men, have spent hundreds of years trying to heap blame on us and fill us with fear so they can keep our sexuality under control, and especially so they can remind us that sex, for women, is closely tied to reproduction and men's sexual pleasure. Remember that even today, in the same social and cultural circles where women are looked down on for having multiple sexual partners, there's nothing but admiration for a man who has multiple partners.
I BELIEVE IN PORN
I believe in porn's potential to help women keep our sexual revolution going. This fight is far from over, so it has to be kept alive. It wasn't settled in the 1970s—it was just getting started.
I believe we can benefit from watching sexually explicit films. We're sexually liberated these days, and we can find pornographic images that will inspire us to follow our bliss. Porn can help us spice up our fantasies and discover tastes we never even knew we had.
And porn can be an instrument of education and liberation for women who are still struggling with shame, guilt, and sexual repression. We can see that desires and fantasies we thought were abnormal are actually quite common. As women, we have to give ourselves permission to explore our sexuality.
Not only do we have to learn to enjoy sex, we have to demand our right to sexual pleasure.
For Kate Millett, "there is some usefulness in explicitness" because it can help women recover from "dreadful patriarchal ideas that sex is evil and that the evil in it is women"; see the interview with Millett by Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible" (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
Some of the women who say they don't like porn have never watched even a single frame of a pornographic movie, so their rejection of porn is traditional and conventional, with no basis in objective reality.
In the Victorian era, as we'll see in the next chapter, the puritans took care to keep pornography under wraps and make it available only to upper-class men, always behind closed doors in private libraries or all-male clubs. They kept an iron grip on this material because they thought it might arouse uncontrollable desires if it were to fall into the wrong hands—hands weaker than their own. So they tried to shield their "inferiors" from sex in all its depravity. And who were the ones banished from sexuality? Who were these vulnerable beings who couldn't be trusted with sex? They were women, children, and anyone from the lower classes. Only a man of means could be admitted to the secret world of sex.
But the notion of sex as something dirty is fairly recent. It reached full flower with the puritanism of the nineteenth century (graphic representations of sex were not considered obscene in ancient cultures). This repressive attitude had originally taken root at the high point of Judeo-Christian culture, when sex was gradually coming to be seen as forbidden fruit. Recall what the "holy" Bible says—that Eve, that slut, tempted poor innocent Adam with an apple and brought the noble purity of man and all of Paradise to ruin.
With the spread of Judeo-Christian norms and morals all over the West, people began to discriminate between acceptable, pure, noble culture (a culture of chastity, virginity, purity, and Stoicism) and low, dirty, immoral culture (the culture to which representations of sex were consigned). Hedonism became a forbidden philosophy of life.
Genre:
- On Sale
- May 25, 2010
- Page Count
- 240 pages
- Publisher
- Seal Press
- ISBN-13
- 9781580053518
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