On Good Porn and Bad Language
There's a regular exchange science fiction writers are subject to when discussing our genre of choice with the uninitiated. "That's not science fiction", pronounces the unfamiliar reader when introduced to science fiction they enjoy. "That's quality literature!"
I see an eerie similarity between this and the responses of people who encounter my porn or other porn they enjoy and immediately want to reclassify it as something other than porn or qualify that ugly, scary word with a gentling term beforehand. "Call it erotica. Call it fine art nudes. Call it art porn. Call it feminist porn!"
Er... no.
I am a feminist and an artist. I make porn. I do not make “feminist porn” or "art porn". Neither do I attach any of the other words that describe my identity, experience or beliefs to the porn I make. I understand the political utility of the term "feminist porn" to challenge an artificially constructed historic opposition between those two words, but it's still difficult in this age not to hear one word as an excuse, a defense, or a rationalization for the other. Does explicit sexual content still need excusing? Does feminism?
I make porn informed by my lived reality as someone queer, black, male, actively polyamorous, happily partnered, middle-class, anti-authoritarian, educated, anti-capitalist, feminist, over 40, a BDSM player, invisibly disabled, poor, a dirty pervert, a survivor of homelessness, sexual assault and breast cancer, deeply invested in promoting sexual health and honest relationships, committed to decent labour practice. (No, this isn't an exhaustive list identity-wise.) My work is also strongly informed by my interests in comedy, theater, music and environmental justice and by my parallel practices as an educator, performer, technician, writer and visual artist. Should I include all of these variables in the definition of my work? Even if by some miracle my political and experiential perspectives were successfully reflected in my projects, I'm allergic to the idea of attaching any of those perspectives as legitimizing modifiers before the word “porn”.
Sometimes I make work to turn me on or to turn on my friends. Sometimes I make work to get paid. Sometimes I make work to promote an idea. Sometimes I don't know why I've made a particular piece until I'm done or years later, if ever. The product is still usually pornographic, neither diminished nor necessarily enhanced by my motivation, which may or may not be obvious in the finished product. That work will go where neither the intent beforehand nor categories applied afterward can follow, and it needs to succeed or fail on its own terms.
Within debates in feminist circles and elsewhere about explicit sexual content, one of the clearest progressive messages is that the word “porn” by itself functions most usefully as a relatively value-neutral term. One does a disservice to language by letting genre descriptions stand in for critiques of the intent or function of any specific media creation. (Using "documentary" as a shorthand to mean "media my Mom likes" doesn't work in a world full of documentaries, for instance.) What may be glaringly obvious to some needs still to be stated: material in a genre as broad as porn is neither automatically evil nor inherently liberatory. Any particular piece of porn can be good, bad, strong on some fronts or weak on others without being representative of the category as a whole. In her online article Pornocracy « Porn « Erotica Andi Marie writing as minivanlibertine articulates this core rebuttal of the anti-porn movement's absolutism: “When the sex we are shown comes from a greed for money versus a greed for the flesh, it is dull, monotonous, and induces sleep instead of arousal. The problem is not porn—the problem is really bad porn.”
If the problem is really “bad porn” or if the problems and their symptoms include “really bad porn”, the solutions must also be qualitative rather than nominative: not categories that designate some porn as universally “good”, but rather hard work that makes some porn good for some audiences, some participants and some producers some of the time. We know that not all news reporting, not all watercolour paintings and not all poems are to everyone's taste, pay equal attention to production values, are equally honest or equally caring in their creation. Why would we expect any less variety from depictions of sex, particularly as sex is something most of us do and feel from an intensely personal, subjective place?
From my perspective, one danger to labeling some porn "safe" through the use of a taming prefix (alt-porn, feminist porn, post-porn, etc.) is the tendency to thereafter assume some magical, hermetic continuity between the label, the creators' presumed intent, the production process and the subsequent marketing/reception of work. In actuality, that someone wants to make or is claiming to make porn according to a particular shared political view doesn't guarantee that they even share our perspective on that particular view. Even less does it promise that they share our perspective on how the porn is made, who it is made for or how it is paid for. Some of the most consistently complained-about bullies on the web got big through associating themselves with the terms "community", "feminism", and "pinup". The alt-porn success story is in part a story of consumers being led to believe that repackaging online masturbation material with new jargon transforms the content or its function.
The (straight, male) raincoat crowd keeps politically associated indie smut alive just as politicized queer female viewers help to support distributors of mainstream heterosexual and gay male stroke videos. If there were a universal, identity-based separation of audience between types of porn, how would we measure it? Self-reportage is inevitably dishonest in this realm, but human perversity knows no demographic boundary. The inevitable (and pedagogically useful) reality of audience overlap doesn't disappear with application of a new label.
Sanctioning a category of content and thereby imagining that it is protected from non-sanctioned-category marketing or the non-sanctioned-category gaze is a strange kind of wishful thinking. Content initially released as anti-racist porn by, with and for black men won't take too long to reappear repackaged as Hot Black Studs Humping Hot Black Studs for White Entertainment. Imagining impermeable consistencies (between creator and audience, intent and practice) misses out on political opportunities that exist beyond preaching to the choir, whilst exempting producers from examination of the messages our content might convey when shown in contexts beyond our ideal/intended audiences.
Similarly, naming a sub-genre does not assure performers and crew of ethical treatment at the hands of producers in that named bracket. I'm personally more aware of deceit, chronic underpayment and other exploitative practices in the production of material sanctioned as queer/indie/educational (the areas I've worked in for much of my career) than in the many mainstreams of porn. That is not to say that exploitation is actually any more endemic in one sub-genre of porn than another, or is as present in the overall industry of porn as in industries like food service or garment manufacture. Rather, I would say that all media-making merits individual scrutiny, and I don't see how anointing an area of practice with sanctifying prefixes contributes to that scrutiny.
What do you think?
[I wrote this micro-essay on Monday, Feb 1, 2010 in response to a requested quote for a friend of a friend to use in an essay about feminist porn. My apologies to her for the awkwardness of language, and my thanks to the friends who took time from their busy days to provide such useful feedback. I hope parts of it suit some of her needs.]