Feminst Porn vs Porn for Women

Another year, another Porn for Women Retrospective from Ms Naughty. The most shocking bit that I had missed focuses on Nikki Gloudeman's October Huffington Post article titled "Seriously, Why Is There No Good Porn for Women?" Can we all pull out our hair now?

The good news is that Gloudeman eventually admitted that she was "very wrong, shamefully wrong", and wrote a follow-up article containing interviews with Angie Rowntree, Anna Frolicme, Erika Lust, and Jacky St James. It's well worth reading. But there's one point that wasn't made as forcefully as it should have been: If you want to find good, quality porn that isn't misogynistic, then you are probably going to have to pay for it. Which you should be doing anyway.

Among the posts of Ms Naughty's I was happy to be reminded about are one on "Scripted Fantasy vs 'Authenticity'" and another on "The Male Gaze in Porn". We wrote on both those topics ourselves (authenticity here, male gaze here), but we didn't make a cool video about the latter the way Ms Naughty did.

Another thing I hadn't seen is an article on feminist porn that Tristan Taormino seems to have written for Good Vibrations, the sex toy shop. Along the way, she asks: "What's the difference between feminist porn, couples porn, and porn for women?" This is an interesting and much debated question. As Tristan says, "couples porn" is basically a marketing term that signifies that the sex scenes are a bit less explicit (fewer genital closeups) and more vanilla (less anal and rough sex, fewer if any "facials"). It's less clear what "porn for women" is.

And Tristan doesn't really say what she thinks "porn for women" is, other than to remark that "as a genre, 'porn for women' acknowledges women as creators behind the scenes as well as viewers, consumers, and fans". But when she says how feminist porn differs from both couples porn and "porn for women", she says that (i) feminist porn "doesn't assume it knows 'what women want'", (ii) that it doesn't "fix a particular style of filmmaking, aesthetic, or narrative as its ideal", and (iii) that it doesn't "narrow its focus to specific types of content". But we don't think "porn for women" either does or needs to do any of these things. As evidence, we offer Ms Naughty's own films, since she is perhaps the biggest proponent of the label "porn for women". But we'll just let her speak for herself on this point, as she often has.

For us, we think "porn for women" is best defined negatively. It's anything that acknowledges that its the viewer isn't necessarily a stereotypical guy with stereoptypically male fantasies. It's anything that fixes something other than the stereotypical porn aesthetic as its ideal. And the truth is that "porn for women" typically widens its focus beyond certain specific types of content to include, for example: passionate kissing and caressing; genuine pussy eating that is actually pleasurable to the recipient; other forms of sexual pleasure experienced by women, including genuine orgasms; women whose enjoyment of pleasuring their partner couldn't be more obvious; sex between performers who have a real passion for each other; and all sorts of other things that are typically absent from mainstream porn.

To think that "porn for women" is somehow restrictive or reactionary, you have to either miss or ignore the perfectly obvious point that most porn is "porn for men". It's the same here as in so many other domains. What's "for men" is treated as if it were just "for people", because what's male is just the default and not seen as gendered at all. And if women don't like it, well, that's just more proof that women aren't really people. Or, to put it differently, "porn for women" would be better described as just porn that isn't "porn for men". Here's Ms Naughty again:

It's the long history of women’s exclusion from porn which makes the term "porn for women" still useful. Porn in and of itself has long been a man's domain which has meant that women's participation in, and enjoyment of porn, has always been othered. If the feminist idea of intersectionality is applied, we can't ignore this history of othering. It has an effect on the way people view and experience porn now.

So I think dismissing the concept of "porn for women" is kind of like saying "Oh yes, women used to suffer inequality but it’s all good now." Because the fact is that it's not. Almost all porn is still aimed at white heterosexual men. The fact that there is now a greater diversity of feminist and queer porn with a wider variety of perspectives doesn't preclude the fact that it's still fucking difficult to find something non-sexist that is focused on the clit, not the cock.

(See also here.)

Nonetheless, we tend to be more cautious than Ms Naughty is about using the term "porn for women", mostly because we don't want to give the impression that the stuff we are reviewing here is only suitable for women and isn't likely to be enjoyed by men. (This comes out nicely in some of the interviews Gloudeman did.) We'd could just call it "porn that doesn't suck", but we choose to use the label "feminist porn" instead.

One might worry, though, that we're using the label "feminist porn" in a way that is too broad. As Tristan says, feminist porn is nothing if not feminist, and that means it has in some way to be political, to aim (as she says) "to spark and change public conversations about sex and sexuality" and, we would add, gender and sexist oppression. But we think most porn for women (and even a lot of couples porn) embraces at least some feminist values. Even if female-friendly porn is not always explicitly political, anything that portrays women as sexual agents who are entitled to equal sexual pleasure carries a political message that squirts in the face of sexist oppression. That is a very sad fact, but it is a fact nonetheless.