Feminist porn: putting female desire in the picture?

A woman sits in a shop selling vintage 1960s knick-knacks. Her red hair is done up in an elaborate beehive and her make-up is flicked into a cat-eye. A retro dress enhances her voluptuous figure. The shop door tinkles and a man in a dark suit walks in. After a few minutes it becomes apparent that the two share more than a love of flowery upholstery and retro laminate table-tops. They also share a love of sex.

This is Mad Men Porn, one of the latest chapters of XConfessions, an ongoing film project by Erika Lust that sees women email in their sexual fantasies so that Lust can recreate them into short porn films. A Don Draper fan got in touch, presumably.

Erika Lust is an award-winning soothsayer for all things feminist porn. She has turned herself into a one-woman porn industry. Her vision is contained in a production company, Lust Films, a successful online store and an ebook. Such is the extent of her work that Lust has become something of a porn evangelist as she seeks to spread the word of feminist porn.

The industry meets annually at the Feminist Porn Awards in Toronto, while the movement continues to gather followers and practitioners. Blogs surrounding the culture are on the rise, with the likes of Cosmopolitan, Bustle and New York magazine's website The Cut reviewing and linking to websites such as Lust Cinema, Bright Desire, and For the Girls.

Real female sexuality

The basic question about feminist porn is: how is it different to male, mainstream porn? Sex-positive feminists argue it is about portraying real female sexuality and desire in an industry that otherwise caters solely to male fantasy. On the opposing end of the debate, anti-porn feminists point to how pornography predicates an objectification of the female body, and therefore remains a disenfranchising medium for women to consume or take part in.

Gail Dines, a leading anti-porn activist who wrote Pornland: How Porn Hijacked Our Sexuality, believes that to profit from a woman's body is simply anti-women and therefore anti-feminist.

Erika Lust has had more than her fair share of debates on the subject. She believes that, since the start of the feminist movement in the 1970s, there has been a reluctance to engage with the medium of pornography, and says she doesn’t care what certain feminists have to say on the subject. “Feminism is a diverse movement. We don’t have to think as a compact collective,” she says on the phone from her Barcelona base.

Lust defends female pornographers as feminists, saying porn should be dealt with as one of the battlegrounds for the movement. “As a sex-positive feminist I believe that feminism should tackle all aspects of cultural and artistic expression, which includes pornography.”

To Lust, each take, each scene, each movie, is a way of setting the record straight for women by allowing the debate to defeat accepted portrayals of female sexuality. “Porn is actually a discourse about our sexuality and is a way for us to be freed from social paradigms.”

On the question of whether or not porn is emancipatory for women, Lust has no doubts. To portray a woman “doing” rather than “being done to” is fundamentally a pro-women act. “Sex is liberating. Women being in control of their sexuality, knowing exactly what they want and how they want it is incredibly empowering.”

What most feminist porn shares is a distaste and disregard for mainstream male pornography, which Lust describes as lacking in “sexual intelligence, creativity and narrative”. She thinks male directors and their films are a waste of time; one can’t debate with the former nor watch the latter, she says.

Fans and practitioners are quick to point to the superiority of feminist porn’s production values and aesthetics. Lust puts this down to the fact that the film-maker is trying to see things from the female perspective, which leads to “attention to detail, the quality of the image, sound and colour, as well as the manufacturing of a narrative that is coherent and in line with the philosophy of feminism”. The importance of a high production value gets several mentions.

Her own films are arguably more beautifully shot than the vast majority of mainstream porn, with a greater focus on storyline, a slower pace and tasteful interiors. Plus-size women and pubic hair make regular appearances alongside other sights one rarely sees in the badly lit polyester and linoleum hotel rooms of mainstream porn.

Strong storyline

Most people who haven’t seen feminist porn might guess that what characterises it is the creation of a strong storyline and narrative, as women’s erotica often relies on the power of story. That assumption would appear to be correct, as Lust says. “The empowerment of the narrative is key to me. This is crucial to differentiate ourselves from mainstream porn. The narrative in feminist erotica leads up to empowering women in every way possible.”

When talking to Erika Lust about porn, it is clear the behind-the-scenes ethics are as important as the ones going on in front of the cameras. Her team are mostly women. “We can’t make indie erotic with a female gaze with a crew of men,” she says. The actors’ healthcare and payment of the crew are also prioritised, setting an example for how the industry should be.

The drawback is money. It is far more expensive to produce films such as Erika Lust’s than it is to produce mainstream porn, which is why it is more difficult to find free feminist porn online. And yet, given its successes, it would seem that more people are willing to pay to consume it no matter how niche it seems.

Lust often compares the consumption and production of porn to that of food in a supermarket. You buy organic tomatoes because you believe in the principles that led the farmer to grow them that way. Lust says this same scrupulous and ubiquitous code of ethics should be applied to our consumption of porn.

Stepford Slut

As a feminist-porn evangelist, Lust is pitch-perfect, solidifying her status firstly as a feminist, secondly as an artist and thirdly as a left-leaning businesswoman with workers’ rights in mind. And yet criticism of feminist porn persists.

Gail Dines makes an analogy that is hard to forget. In her criticism of the influence of porn on popular culture, she talks about how we have traded in the Stepford Wife model of a woman that feminists of the 1970s abhorred for a new model: the Stepford Slut. Whereas once it was the floors that were being waxed, polished and perfected for the appreciation of men, it is now another area that is kept to an impossibly high standard.

Whereas Lust sees a woman knowingly having sex as an empowering feminist image, Dines believes it is a mainstream porn image that represents the internalisation of “porn ideology” – “an ideology that often masquerades as advice on how to be hot, rebellious and cool in order to attract and keep a man”.

Equating porn with empowerment – as feminist porn does – promotes the idea that emancipation comes from emulating the hypersexual women the industry puts forward, according to Dines.

Feminist porn occupies a new niche corner of the vast porn industry, one that deserves attention. It is perhaps a luxury to even have a feminist porn dilemma.

The landscape is changing. Time will tell if feminist porn has staying power.