Using the introduction to “A Taste for Brown Sugar” (written by UCSB’s own Mireille Miller-Young) and the introduction to “the Feminist Porn Book,” in 300 words or more please identify at least two popular (mis)/conceptions of pornography, and at least three ways these texts define or redefine “pornography” and/or “feminist porn”?
You must include at least five references (in any combination) to these two different texts to receive full credit.
OR
In no less than 300 words, use Fox (2018) and Webber & Sullivan (2018) to describe how pornography is treated as a public health crisis, and some of the impacts of its construction as a “crisis.”
You must reference both of the readings at least two times.
Regardless of which topic you choose to write on, you must respond to one classmate in no less than 100 words
Center your forum post on the authors’ voices, and save any personal opinions or experiences for the peer responses.
Here is the classmates writing that need to response:
Pornography and the sex industry is treated as a public health crisis for various reasons, but not always the right ones. As Weber and Sullivan address it in “Constructing a crisis: porn panics and public health”, they “do not believe such claims are motivated by a desire to ensure the physical and social well-being of the populace. Rather, employing the language of ‘public health’, ostensibly apolitical and objective, is a well-devised strategy to impose sexually conservative moral imperatives. The fact that the public health argument is operationalized primarily by moral activists with a retrograde understanding of both health and media scholarship, not by public health professionals or people involved in the pornography industry, should be enough to give any person pause. “This reiterates the idea that laws and movements against pornography and the sex industry are lead by people with false pretenses and ulterior motives, usually because of a difference in morals or beliefs. It is clear that this is sometimes the case because they have no real evidence to back up their claims. When asked, “If porn is a public health crisis, then, what exactly are the health outcomes of watching too much pornography? That is the fundamental stumbling block of anti-porn advocates” they usually blame it on “insisting that young men are the unwilling victims of a runaway epidemic of pornography”. They do not admit that there are men actively seeking porn, or even women as well, and that it is an industry in high demand.
Health concerns have impacted the public many times before, one being the AIDS epidemic. It became a tricky situation between individual rights and public health, but ended up in “mandatory testing, reporting, and quarantine, as well as the closure of community sexual spaces such as bathhouses. It continues today in the form of mandatory testing and reporting blood bans for men who have sex with men and the criminalization of non-disclosure of one’s HIV status to sexual partners”. This wasn’t the first time the public good was seen as more important than individuals’ privacy, but things have been much more aggressive than I ever would have known by including things like, “forced sterilizations, false mental health diagnoses, criminalization and incarceration, dangerous and untested therapeutic interventions, medical incompetence, and human rights violations.”
Not addressing or attempting to help the issues is preventing it from becoming safer and actually does more harm than good. As Fox writes about in “A sex worker perspective”,“Sex workers remain stigmatized and hidden from the dominant social imaginary in ways which make it hard for others to understand us as potential conversational partners with expert knowledge about our own lives.” Making it illegal and hard for these people to get good health care just makes it more dangerous for everyone.
An example of how this problem could be fixed and the system improved is to look at how other countries are handling the situation. “Furthermore, the erasure of porn and other sex workers from the ongoing public dialogue about pornography and health prevents us from addressing the very real health crises which we do face. At present, I live and work in Australia in a jurisdiction where sex work is legalized and licensed. Unlicensed and non-compliant workers continue to face criminalization and punitive interference by the police. The Australian healthcare system provides adequate care to a greater proportion of marginalized people, including sex workers; nonetheless, sex work stigma regularly affects the quality of the care we receive.” I think the first and most important step is to allow sex workers to have a voice and put rumors to rest, which may change the way some people feel toward pornography and lead to better options for them.
Quiz Question:
1. In the introduction to A Taste for Brown Sugar, Miller-Young positions pornography as an important intellectual site to think about which option below?
Select one:
- A. sexual culture and racial ideologies
- B. the failures of public schools’ sex education
- C. the ubiquity of media and its consequences for young people
- D. “pimps” and sex trafficking
2. The authors of The Feminist Porn Book argue that the descriptors of “antiporn” vs. “pro-porn/sex positive” camps that came out of the porn wars are or are not adequate to describe the complexities and nuances of feminist porn politics?
Select one:
- a. are
- b. are not
3. Webber and Sullivan argue that the topic of sex should be off-limits to public health officials and experts, as the legislation will be inherently unethical.
Select one:
- a.True
- b.False
4. What is the definition of Illicit eroticism (Miller-Young) best described as ?
Select one:
- a. the ways the Black women mobilize sexuality that both confront and manipulate discourses of sexual deviance that are applied to them in order to gain financial or other resources
- b. a way to describe so-called “deviant” sex including kink/BDSM that signals how it is devalued in society in comparison to more normative sexual acts
- c. a term to describe sex work like stripping that signals the ways that workers in that industry are devalued according to ‘tiers of labor value’
- d. a term that refers to the ways that we as a society are discouraged from talking about sexuality, as it is too “illicit” a topic, rather than being able to speak freely about all forms of sexuality
Below is the the reading files for this assignment.
Introduction Brown Sugar
Theorizing Black Women’s Sexual Labor in Pornography
You are not supposed to talk about liking sex because you are already
assumed to be a whore.—J E A N N I E PE PPE R
In a private gathering following the East Coast Video Show in Atlantic City
in 2002, legendary performer Jeannie Pepper received a special achievement
award for twenty years in the porn industry, the longest career for any black
adult actress. “It’s been a long, hard road,” she said to the audience of adult
entertainment performers, insiders, and fans as she accepted the award from
popular adult film actor Ron Jeremy. “There weren’t many black women in
the business when I started.”1 In 1982, when Jeannie Pepper began her career
as an actress in X- rated films, there were few black women in the adult film
industry. Performing in more than two hundred films over three decades,
Jeannie broke barriers to achieve porn star status and opened doors for other
women of color to follow.2 She played iconic roles as the naughty maid, the
erotically possessed “voodoo girl,” and the incestuous sister in films like Guess
Who Came at Dinner?, Let Me Tell Ya ’Bout Black Chicks, and Black Taboo. She
traveled abroad as a celebrity, working and living in Germany for seven years.
In a career that spanned the rise of video, DVD, and the Internet, Jeannie
watched the pornography business transform from a quasi- licit cottage in-
dustry into a sophisticated, transnational, and corporate- dominated industry.
In 1997 Jeannie was the first African American porn actress to be inducted
into the honored Adult Video News (AVN) Hall of Fame. By all accounts,
Jeannie had an exceptionally long and successful career for an adult actress:
she was well liked by her colleagues, and was a mentor to young women new
to the porn business. Yet, as her acceptance speech reveals, her experience of
being a black woman in the porn industry was shaped by formidable chal-
lenges. As in other occupations in the United States, black women in the adult
FIGURE I. 1. Jeannie Pepper during her tour of Europe, Cannes, France, 1986.
Courtesy of JohnDragon.com.
B ROW N SU G A R 3
film industry are devalued workers who confront systemic marginalization
and discrimination.
Jeannie became a nude model and adult film actress in her twenties be-
cause she enjoyed watching pornography and having sex, and she was keen
to become a path- maker in an industry with few black female stars: “I just
wanted to show the world. Look, I’m black and I’m beautiful. How come
there are not more black women doing this?”3 She felt especially beautiful
when in 1986 she did a photo shoot with her photographer husband, a Ger-
man expatriate known as John Dragon, on the streets of Paris. Dressed only
in a white fur coat and heels, Jeannie walked around, posing in front of the
Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, cafés, luxury cars, and shops. Coyly allowing
her coat to drape open (or off altogether) at opportune moments, she drew
the attention of tourists and residents alike. She imagined herself as Josephine
Baker, admired in a strange new city for her beauty, class, and grace. Finding
esteem and fearlessness in showing the world her blackness and beauty, even
in the cityscapes of Paris, Hamburg, or Rome, Jeannie felt she embodied an
emancipated black female sexuality.
Still, she remained conscious of the dual pressures of needing to fight for
recognition and opportunity in the adult business, especially in the United
States, and having to defend her choice to pursue sex work as a black woman.4
FIGURE I.2. Jeannie Pepper poses in the nude before onlookers outside of the Carlton
Hotel, Cannes, France, 1986. Courtesy of JohnDragon.com.
4 I N T RO D U C T I O N
As Jeannie asserts in the epigraph, she perceived that part of the difficulty of
being a professional “whore”—in photographs and films—was the expec-
tation that she was not supposed to talk about or inhabit her sexuality in
ways that would seem to exacerbate harmful stereotypes about black women,
namely their alleged hypersexuality. Black women sexual performers and
workers have had to confront a prevailing stigma: if all black women are con-
sidered to be sexually deviant, then those who use sex to make a living are the
greatest threat to any form of respectable black womanhood.
“Brown sugar,” this popular imaginary of African American women, satu-
rates popular culture. In songs, films, music videos, and everyday life, the dis-
course of brown sugar references the supposed essence of black female sexu-
ality. It exposes historical mythologies about the desirable yet deviant sexual
nature of black women. Publicly scorned and privately enjoyed, the alluring,
transformative, and supposedly perverse sexuality of black women is thor-
oughly cemented in the popular imaginary. Seen as particularly sexual, black
women continue to be fetishized as the very embodiment of excessive or non-
normative sexuality. What is most problematic about this sticky fetishism—in
addition to the fact that it spreads hurtful and potentially dangerous stereo-
types with very real material effects—is that the desire for black women’s
sexuality, while so prevalent, is unacknowledged and seen as illegitimate in
most popular discourse.
As a metaphor, brown sugar exposes how black women’s sexuality, or more
precisely their sexual labor, has been historically embedded in culture and
the global economy. Now a key component of the profitable industries of
entertainment and sex in the United States, brown sugar played a central
role in the emergence of Western nation- states and the capitalist economies.
Across the American South and the Caribbean, black slaves cultivated and
manufactured sugar that sweetened food, changed tastes, and energized fac-
tory workers in the Industrial Revolution.5 In addition to physical labor, their
sexual labor was used to “give birth to white wealth,”6 and was thus the key
mechanism for reproducing the entire plantation complex. “Sugar was a mur-
derous commodity,” explains Vincent Brown, “a catastrophe for workers that
grew it.”7 The grinding violence and danger that attended sugar’s cultivation
in colonial plantations literally consumed black women’s labor and bodies.8
Brown sugar, as a trope, illuminates circuits of domination over black
women’s bodies and exposes black women’s often ignored contributions to
the economy, politics, and social life. Like sugar that has dissolved without a
trace, but has nonetheless sweetened a cup of tea, black women’s labor and the
mechanisms that manage and produce it are invisible but nonetheless there.
B ROW N SU G A R 5
To take the metaphor a bit further, the process of refining cane sugar from its
natural brown state into the more popular white, everyday sweetener reflects
how black women, like brown sugar, represent a raw body in need of refine-
ment and prone to manipulation. The lewdness and raw quality associated
with brown sugar in popular discourse today thus shows how ideas about
black women as naturally savage, super- sexual beings have flavored popular
tastes even as they have driven a global appetite for (their) sweetness. While
processed white sugar is held up as the ideal, there remains a powerful desire,
indeed a taste, for the real thing.
The metaphor of brown sugar exposes how representations shape the world
in which black women come to know themselves. But stereotypes usually
have dual valences: they may also be taken up by the oppressed and refash-
ioned to mean something quite different. Although brown sugar has been
used as a phrase to talk about black women as lecherous, prurient sex ob-
jects, unlike other tropes such as the Mammy, Jezebel, or Sapphire, it conveys
sweetness, affection, and respect. In African American vernacular speech and
song, brown sugar often expresses adoration, loveliness, and intimacy even
as it articulates lust, sensuality, and sex (along with other illicit, pleasure-
giving materials like heroin or marijuana).9 As in the saying, “the blacker the
berry, the sweeter the juice,” brown sugar is sometimes used by black people
to speak to the complex pleasures they derive from their own eroticism. In
this book brown sugar references a trope that black women must always bro-
ker. Sometimes they refashion this trope to fit their needs. As Jeannie Pepper
shows, some black women choose to perform brown sugar—the perverse,
pleasurable imago projected onto black women’s bodies—in an effort to ex-
press themselves as desired and desiring subjects. Given the brutal history
of sexual expropriation and objectification of black bodies, these attempts
by black women to reappropriate a sexualized image can be seen as a bid to
reshape the terms assigned to black womanhood. In this case, brown sugar
might be a realm for intervention in their sexualization.
Some black women might view Jeannie Pepper, the porn star, as a menace
to the hard- fought image of respectable womanhood they have sought to cre-
ate for more than one hundred years.10 Nevertheless, even though black sex
workers know that their labor is seen to constitute a betrayal of respectable
black womanhood, some pursue it. Their reasons may be purely economic:
it’s a job, and they must survive and take care of their families, after all. Or, in
Jeannie Pepper’s case, their motivations could be to take pleasure in “show-
[ing] the world” a beautiful and sexually self- possessed black woman. While
such a move to represent oneself may be viewed, especially by many in the
6 I N T RO D U C T I O N
African American community, as perpetuating historical and ongoing stereo-
types born out of horrible abuse, it is a powerful statement about how some
black women redefine what respectable womanhood means for them. For
Jeannie, more important than respectability, is respect.11 Respect means being
acknowledged and valued for her performative sexual labor and treated as a
star. Jeannie Pepper’s story illustrates how the perception of black women as
hypersexual, which has persisted since the slave trade, has made it extremely
difficult to acknowledge that some black women have an interest in leverag-
ing hypersexuality. But it is possible to leverage this treacherous discourse and
the black women who speak to us in A Taste for Brown Sugar explain how.
They use the seductive power of brown sugar to intervene in representation,
to assert their varied sexual subjectivities, and to make a living. In the process
of making tough choices about how and when to commodify their sexualities,
these women offer more complex readings of black gender and sexual identity
than now prevail in the academy and popular culture. Porn is an important
terrain in which this alternative sexual politics can emerge.
Pornography as Culture and Industry
Pornography is a highly controversial category, not just for its content but
because it sparks heated debates about its role in society. Most often por-
nography is defined as a genre of mass- produced written or visual materials
designed to arouse or titillate the reader or viewer. A facet of entertainment
culture and a domain of the commercial sex industry since its modern cir-
culation in literature, photography, and film in the nineteenth century, por-
nography has been powerfully regulated as the explicit, obscene edge of ac-
ceptable forms of sexuality. It is also more than a kind of object or media;
pornography is an idiom that communicates potent, blunt, and transgres-
sive sexuality operating at the boundaries of licit and illicit, sacred and pro-
fane, private and public, and underground and mainstream culture. Hence, as
Walter Kendrick argues, “ ‘pornography’ names an argument, not a thing.”12
Pornography becomes a map of a culture’s borders, a “detailed blueprint of
the culture’s anxieties, investments, contradictions,”13 and a site of cultural
contest about social access and social prohibition.14 Focusing on pornogra-
phy since the rise of the modern adult film industry in the 1970s, A Taste for
Brown Sugar analyzes the operation of black women’s sexuality—its condi-
tions of production, modes of representation, and strategic performances—
in both the industry and idiom of pornography. This book traces the work of
B ROW N SU G A R 7
the black female body in pornography as a material object, but it also delves
into pornography’s function as a cultural discourse about racialized sexuality.
Does pornography really make much of an impact on how we view sex,
race, and gender? One argument about porn’s relevance is that it is big busi-
ness with big cultural effects. Many critics have cited the broad impact of por-
nography on American life since its legalization during the sexual revolution
of the 1960s and ’70s.15 With revenues of nearly $8–$10 billion a year, the adult
entertainment industry is one of the largest entertainment industries in the
United States.16 Pornographic films, videos, and websites are one part of this
larger industry that includes exotic dance clubs, phone sex, magazines, peep
booths, and sex toys. While Hollywood makes nearly four hundred films each
year, the adult industry makes more than ten thousand.17
This book focuses on photographic film and digital media from the turn of
the twentieth century to the early twenty- first, a period during which pornog-
raphy became a “phenomenon of media culture and a question of mass pro-
duction.”18 Indeed, mechanisms of mass production and consumption have
become central to the growing convergence of sexual aesthetics and media
industries, and their prominent role in defining private fantasies and pub-
lic spaces. In recent years we have seen this convergence happening within
popular culture, from “porno chic” fashion, to reality TV shows such as The
Girls Next Door, to mainstream films like Zack and Miri Make a Porno and
Boogie Nights, to adult actress and entrepreneur Jenna Jameson being inter-
viewed on Oprah. Porn as an entrance into everyday consumer life can be seen
as producing what many critics have termed the “pornification” or “porne-
tration” of culture.19 Previously illicit subcultures, communities, and sexual
practices have been brought into the public eye through pornography, and in
the process they have made their way into other modes of culture, including
fashion, art, mainstream film, music, and television. Celebrity sex tapes, po-
litical sex scandals, and popular sex panics around issues like youth “sexting”
have popularized the idea of public sex as a symptom of a pornographic main-
stream media; they ignite worry that what is being projected and amplified is
the worst of American sexual experience in terms of taste, values, and poli-
tics. Indeed, based on documentaries such as Chyng Sun’s The Price of Plea-
sure, one would imagine that the biggest threat to society is not war, torture,
poverty, or environmental degradation, but the proliferation of pornography
and its representation of “bad sex.”20 Rather than an act of romance, intimacy,
or love, bad sex is seen as the product of the narcissistic, self- interested char-
acter of our culture. This unfeeling, vulgar kind of sex rubs up against expec-
8 I N T RO D U C T I O N
tations of personal morality and rational social values rooted in traditional,
bourgeois views of sex for the reproduction of proper families and citizens.
Thus, fears of bad sex expose powerful anxieties about how changing mean-
ings and practices around sex might lead to a downward spiral, a debasing of
social life and the nation.21 More than a debate about how sex is represented
in our culture, porn is a site of moral panic about sex itself.
As an act of speech that speaks the unspeakable, pornography has been
defined by what the state has tried to suppress.22 In the process of pushing
against censorship and obscenity regulation, porn presses and redefines the
limits of the culture of sex. Media technologies have played a leading role
in making porn increasingly accessible and part of the public domain. With
so many genres and subgenres of erotic fascination making up pornogra-
phy’s “kaleidoscopic variorum” we might even think of it in a plural sense:
as pornographies.23 Yet despite its vast proliferation, increased pluralism, and
rich potential for the reimagining of allowable forms of desire, pornography’s
commodification of sex has produced what Richard Fung notes as a “limited
vision of what constitutes the erotic.”24 That porn reproduces predictable,
indeed stereotypical, representations of sexuality for an increasingly niche-
oriented marketplace is not surprising given its profit motive. This limited
erotic vision may also be the result of sexually conservative regulatory sys-
tems, such as obscenity laws, which have defined what may or may not be
broadcast via media technologies like television or the Internet or sold in
stores, whether locally or across state lines.25 In addition to affecting media
policy, the regulation of sexual culture has reinforced severely narrow repre-
sentations of gender, desire, and sexuality that make it difficult to construct
alternative imaginaries, even in supposedly transgressive spaces like pornog-
raphy.26 Nevertheless, pornography reliably takes up the challenge of subvert-
ing norms, even as it catalyzes and perpetuates them. The fantasies it produces
offer fertile spaces to read how eroticism, proliferation, commodification, and
regulation get played out at the very heart of our public consciousness.
In many ways porn is a political theater where—in addition to gender, sex,
and class—racial distinctions and barriers are reiterated even as they may
also be manipulated or transformed.27 Race, or more properly racialization,
the process by which meanings are made and power is structured around
racial differences, informs the production side of commercial pornography
in at least two important ways: in the titillating images themselves and in the
behind- the- scenes dynamics where sex workers are hired to perform in the
production of those images.28 Black women, and other people of color, have
historically been included in pornography to the extent that its producers
B ROW N SU G A R 9
seek to commoditize, circulate, and enable the consumption of their images.
Their bodies represent stereotypes of racial, gender, and sexual difference and
the fantasies or deeper meanings behind them.29 Until recently, when black
women and men started to produce and circulate their own pornographies,
those fantasies were seldom authored by black people.
Black women’s images in hardcore porn show that the titillation of por-
nography is inseparable from the racial stories it tells. A central narrative is
that black women are both desirable and undesirable objects: desirable for
their supposed difference, exoticism, and sexual potency, and undesirable be-
cause these very same factors threaten or compromise governing notions of
feminine sexuality, heterosexual relations, and racial hierarchy. Pornography
did not create these racial stories, these fraught imaginings of black being and
taboo interactions across racial difference, but it uses them. What interests
me is the work of racial fantasy, particularly fantasy involving black women.
Given our racial past and present, what is the labor of the black female body
in pornography? As my informants show, the players of pornography’s racial
imaginarium are the ones who can best discern the crucial implications of
these fantasies for black women’s sexual identities and experiences. They
reveal how some black porn actresses tactically employ the performative
labor of hypersexuality to intervene in their representation, “contest it from
within,”30 and provide a deeper, more complex reading of their erotic lives.
Working On, Within, and Against
Historically, enslaved black women were marked as undesirable objects for
white men due to their primitive sexuality. These women, as the myth went,
were so supersexual that they virtually forced white men into sex they os-
tensibly did not want to have.31 Enslaved black women needed their sexual
powers because otherwise these unwitting white men would never desire
them. This myth concealed, denied, and suppressed the plain sexual exploi-
tation of enslaved and emancipated African American women by casting the
demand for their sexuality, both in images and as labor, as impossible. Chief
to the racial fetishism of black women in pornography, then, is a double focus:
a voyeurism that looks but also does not look, that obsessively enjoys, lingers
over, and takes pleasure in the black female body even while it declares that
body as strange, Other, and abject.32
Black women are of course aware of this regime of racial fetishism in rep-
resentation (and the social and legal apparatus that sustains it), which li-
censes the voyeuristic consumption of their bodies as forbidden sex objects.
10 I N T RO D U C T I O N
As Jeannie Pepper noted, black women are always “already assumed to be”
whores. She, then, uses this insistent myth in her own work. That is, Jeannie
Pepper employs her own illicit desirability in a kind of sexual repertoire. By
precisely staging her sexuality so as to acknowledge and evoke the taboo
desire for it, she shows that racial fetishism can actually be taken up by its ob-
jects and used differently. Standing nude on the beach in the South of France
as throngs of tourists look on, Jeannie takes pleasure in presenting herself as
irresistibly captivating and attractive in the face of the denial of those very
capacities. In this way, Jeannie Pepper exposes the disgust for black female
sexuality as a facade for what is really forbidden desire. It is a myth that can
be reworked and redeployed for one’s own purposes.
Jeannie Pepper shows us how black women—particularly sex workers—
mobilize what I term “illicit eroticism” to advance themselves in adult enter-
tainment’s sexual economy.33 Actively confronting the taboo nature and
fraught history of black female sexuality, black sex workers choose to pur-
sue a prohibited terrain of labor and performance. Illicit eroticism provides
a framework to understand the ways in which black women put hypersexu-
ality to use. They do so in an industry that is highly stratified with numerous
structures of desire and “tiers of desirability.”34 Black women’s illicit erotic
work manipulates and re- presents racialized sexuality—including hyper-
sexuality—in order to assert the value of their erotic capital.35
In an industry where they are marginal to the most lucrative produc-
tions, and where the quality of productions are largely based on demand,
black women, along with Latinas and Asian women, face a lack of opportu-
nities, pay disparities, and racially biased treatment in comparison to white
women.36 Black women are devalued in terms of their erotic worth, and they
are critical of how they are made lesser players in pornography’s theater of
fantasy. These women seek to mobilize their bodies to position themselves to
the greatest advantage. This mobilization requires a complex knowledge of
what it means to “play the game” and to “play up” race by moving and per-
forming strategically. However, because not everyone is able to increase their
status in the established hierarchies of desire, black women employing illicit
erotic labor face a complicated dilemma: lacking erotic capital, how can they
produce more, and in the process enhance their erotic power, social signifi-
cance, and economic position?
One strategy for black women in pornography is to work extremely hard to
carve out space and fabricate themselves as marketable and desirable actors.
Their appearance is important to them; they invest a great deal of time and
money on self- fashioning and taking care of their bodies in order to achieve
FIGURE I. 3. Jeannie Pepper standing before the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France, during
her European tour in 1986. Courtesy of JohnDragon.com.
12 I N T RO D U C T I O N
competitiveness. Performance is critical; most performers attempt to portray
seductive eroticism and sexual skill, which may give them an edge with con-
sumers and added appreciation by other actors and producers. In addition to
appearing in adult videos, they actively cultivate themselves as “porn stars,”
which includes creating a captivating persona and becoming a savvy finan-
cial manager and entrepreneur. Selling themselves as brands or commodities
means spending a great deal of time on promotion, including at photo shoots,
appearances at trade conventions and entertainment- industry events, and on
their websites, social networks, and chat rooms, to foster a fan base. All these
spaces are spaces of work and contestation where black women must fight
for their worth. Even more important, these primarily young, working- class
black women do all this while also acting as mothers, aunts, daughters, sisters,
and partners called upon to play important caretaking roles in their families.
They are women who use their bodies as resources and their determined intel-
lect as tools to make a living, and sometimes make a name too.
Marginalized and exploited in the labor market, many young, working-
class black women today identify the sex industries as preferred spaces to
make a living for themselves and their families.37 This is not new. As the his-
tory of black sexual labor attests, this choice has been recorded as part of
their negotiations of the labor market since slavery and through the Great
Depression.38 Black sex workers make a living when they take sex, which is
associated with leisure and play, and turn it into what Robin D. G. Kelley calls
“play- labor.”39 In commodifying sexuality, play- labor does not necessarily re-
sist or overturn hegemonic institutions of power like patriarchy and racial
capitalism. That is not its purpose. Play- labor is one strategy by which black
women (and others) try to negotiate the existing political economy by using
their corporeal resources, which are some of the only resources many black
working- class women may in fact possess. Given that the other options open
to working- class black women appear in service, care work, or other contin-
gent labor industries, the “choice” to pursue sex work is of course constrained
within a modern capitalist system where all work is exploited work, and black
women’s work is super exploited.40
Part of a continuum of sex work—including streetwalking, private es-
corting, erotic dancing, modeling, phone sex, and S/M role play—and part
of a history of black women working in underground or gray economies as
“mojo women . . . bootleggers, numbers backers and bawdy house operators,”
black women’s work in pornography maneuvers within illicit and licit sexual
economies to pursue what Sharon Harley describes as “personal and commu-
B ROW N SU G A R 13
nity survival.”41 Their maneuvers are generally prompted by market concerns,
like porn’s relatively flexible and high- income work, but also by nonmarket
motives, such as sexual pleasure and the enjoyment of erotic performance.
Garnering fame in the adult entertainment industry is often regarded by per-
formers as a viable aspiration and a stepping- stone to more opportunities
in entertainment. For young black women, attaining fame could also reflect
a desire to harness the erotic capital possessed by recognized black enter-
tainers and actresses such as Beyoncé, Nicki Minaj, Halle Berry, Pam Grier,
and Josephine Baker.
Jeannie Pepper’s identification with Josephine Baker indicates that some
black women working in porn understand the historical depictions of their
bodies as containing dynamic possibilities for reinterpretation and re- creation
through performance. These women work on representations of black sexu-
ality by using their own bodies and imaginations. These representations—
painful, punishing, or pleasurable—are part of what Asian American studies
scholar and filmmaker Celine Parreñas Shimizu terms the “bind of repre-
sentation.”42 As for Asian American women and other women of color in
the United States, racialized sexual representation forms black women’s “very
self- recognition every day and every minute.”43 Because black women are
tethered to ontological concepts of sexual deviance, it is vital to acknowl-
edge hypersexuality as a disciplinary instrument that effects pain, trauma,
and abuse in their lives, and which, like other problematic representations of
race, gender, and sexuality, is extremely hard to escape.44
Black women are not just victims of representation, however. Referencing
three black Oscar- winning Hollywood actresses—Hattie McDaniel, Whoopi
Goldberg, and Halle Berry—feminist literary and media scholar Rebecca
Wanzo shows how many black women entertainers recognize the potentially
recuperative nature of their performances. “Familiar with stereotypes about
black female identity,” writes Wanzo, “they have attempted to reconfigure
themselves as central agents of a particular project and then see themselves
as making themselves objects in relationship to this racist history on their
own terms.”45 Like actresses in the racist and sexist Hollywood film industry,
some black actresses in the adult industry also recognize their performances
as spaces to negotiate the overdetermined and reductive depictions, and try
to engage them on their own terms. White American women are not judged
in the same way, nor are they accused of representing the “hypersexuality of
white womanhood.”46 Yet black women, as individuals, often come to stand
for their entire racial group. Not only are black women performers burdened
14 I N T RO D U C T I O N
with representing every other black woman, they are seen to depict only sim-
plistic and denigrating types.47 Black porn actresses understand that they are
seen as archetypical whores and bad women by both the black community
and the broader, categorically white, culture.
Crucially, these women often assert themselves within these archetypes.
Performers who not only fit the stereotype, but also boldly put it to work in
their performances can be read as having more sophisticated understandings
and counterresponses in relationship to representation than previously ac-
knowledged. In discussing her role as the “voodoo girl” in Let Me Tell Ya ’Bout
Black Chicks, Jeannie explained that she chose a role that, though still a stereo-
typical representation of exotic, supernatural, and hypersexual black woman-
hood, she saw as an alternative to the then- standard role of the maid: “So I
played the part of the voodoo girl. I wanted that part. I was glad to have [it]. I
loved the way they dressed me up, with the costume. They made me look very
exotic with all the makeup and feathers, and I was running around [acting
possessed]. But I didn’t want to play the maids. Those other girls were playing
maids. . . . But I like my part.” By playing the exotically fetishized black woman
instead of the recognizable fetish of the servile black maid, Jeannie negotiated
what she saw as a demeaning representation.48 The voodoo girl was not neces-
sarily a positive representation against the maid’s negative one, but it allowed
space for Jeannie to take pleasure in what she identified as a more complex
performance. Dressed as the primitive, magical savage in a tinsel skirt that
looks more fitting for a luau than a voodoo ceremony, colorful neon bangles,
and 1980s eye- shadow- heavy makeup, Jeannie’s voodoo girl uses a magic spell
to conjure two white men to satisfy her sexual appetite. Jeannie brings erotic
charisma and skill to her enthusiastic performance, stretching it beyond its
impish and narrow construction. And, as she attests, her choice to perform
a playful, mysterious, and (literally) self- possessed female character was a
strategic move. Even though this move did not fully dismantle racist regimes
of representation for black women in pornography, Jeannie’s tactics for self-
representation are important to recognize.
Angel Kelly, a contemporary of Jeannie Pepper in the 1980s, was the first
black woman to win an exclusive contract from an adult film production
company, Perry Ross’s Fantasy Home Video. An A- list actress like Jeannie,
Angel desperately wanted to make choices in her career that would show her
in what she saw as a positive light: as glamorous, sexy, and beautiful. How-
ever, sometimes the nature of the industry meant that she became mired in
the stereotypical construction of black women’s sexuality. Like Jeannie, Angel
was pressured to portray a “voodoo woman”:
B ROW N SU G A R 15
There is one video called Welcome to the Jungle, where I look like an
African, I look like voodoo woman [on the video box cover]. I hate that
picture. I hated it. I hated it! And that’s why I wouldn’t do the movie for
it. So there was no movie, but there was a cover called Wel-
come to the Jungle and what [the producer, Perry Ross] did was he just
made it a compilation tape. See, they can screw you that way anyway
because when they are shooting pictures they got footage on you, and
they can take all your scenes out of one movie and put it with another
cover in another movie.
As Angel describes, she importantly chose to stand up to the demands of her
producer by refusing to star in the production. Yet she did feel pressure to
dress like an “African voodoo woman” for the Welcome to the Jungle (1988)
photo shoot, because as she told me during our phone interview in 2013,
“Sometimes if you wanted to work you had to swallow it. I tried to hold on
the best I could.” Angel felt bitterly about the experience, noting her lack of
power in relationship to the greater power of studios to use and manipulate
her images. For Angel, who had on occasion played the shuffling maid to a
white family (see The Call Girl), negotiating porn work included evaluating
the terms of each production and deciding how she might infuse the role
with her own desires. Angel expressed to me the pleasures she gained in her
work: “I had a chance to play all types of great characters a man could fanta-
size about. I was surprised that I had as many female fans as I did male fans.
I had the opportunity to be a star.”
Black women’s counterstrategies of representation involve at times at-
tempting to play the stereotype in order to reverse or go beyond it. At other
times they offer alternative, more complex images of black sexuality, or they
may refuse the roles altogether.49 In my analyses of black women’s participa-
tion in pornography, I identify where they tell stereotypical stories in their
performances, but also where performers appear to tell stories about them-
selves that aspire to go beyond stereotypes, the “immediately available” stories
told about black women.50 Illicit eroticism, like José Esteban Muñoz’s concept
of “disidentification,” describes how cultural workers enact a repertoire of
skills and theories—including appropriating or manipulating certain stereo-
types—to “negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously
elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phan-
tasm of normative citizenship.”51 Unlike disidentification, illicit eroticism de-
scribes a repertoire of appropriations distinct to the realm of sexual and sexu-
alized labor, available to those whose sexuality has been marked specifically
16 I N T RO D U C T I O N
as illicit, including people of color, and queer folk, including queer people of
color. Illicit eroticism conceptualizes how these actors use sexuality in ways
that necessarily confront and manipulate discourses about their sexual devi-
ance while remaining tied to a system that produces them as marginalized
sexual laborers. For Jeannie Pepper and others, leveraging one stereotype can
mean avoiding another. Yet these performers’ layered work as black women
remains connected to their very survival within a punishing field of repre-
sentation and labor.
Both Jeannie and Angel tell of their aspirations to be seen as more com-
plicated subjects than the pornographic script allowed. Playing up, against,
and within caricature, Jeannie, who delved into a stereotyped role, imagined
herself as an actor depicting a woman with power, one who magically and
mischievously produces men to service her sexual desires, while generating a
kind of glamour and joviality. Imagining a black female pornographic sexu-
ality as joyful, subversive, and attractive, Jeannie’s performance asserts erotic
sovereignty. Her performance attempts to reterritorialize the always already
exploitable black female body as a potential site of self- governing desire, sub-
jectivity, dependence and relation with others, and erotic pleasure.52 Erotic
sovereignty is a process, rather than a completely achieved state of being,
wherein sexual subjects aspire and move toward self- rule and collective af-
filiation and intimacy, and against the territorializing power of the disci-
plining state and social corpus. It is part of an ongoing ontological process
that uses racialized sexuality to assert complex subjecthood, inside of the
overwhelming constraints of social stigma, stereotype, structural inequality,
policing, divestment, segregation, and exploitation under the neoliberal state.
Jeannie’s interventions are never separate from the conditions that propelled
and shaped her work in the porn industry during the 1980s, including the
impact of Ronald Reagan’s devastating economic policies on African Ameri-
cans, and the porn business’s interest in capturing white consumers for black-
cast products during the video era.
By foregrounding the testimonies of black porn actresses like Jeannie Pep-
per and Angel Kelly, I hope to explain how black porn actresses might simul-
taneously challenge and conform to the racial fantasies that overwhelmingly
define their representations and labor conditions. Their negotiations offer a
view into black women’s needs, desires, and understandings, and into the
deeply felt conflict between what stories about black women exist and what
stories they long to imagine for themselves. Agency, a central concept in femi-
nist thought, is generally understood as a person’s ability to achieve free-
dom or “progressive change” in the context of everyday and manifold forms
B ROW N SU G A R 17
of oppression. I draw on postcolonial scholar Saba Mahmood’s productive
conceptualization of agency as a “capacity for action that historically specific
relations of subordination enable and create.”53 Not eliding the role of sub-
ordination, Mahmood reveals agency as existing along a continuum. At times
agency enables progressive change or resistive action, and at other times and
contexts it is the “capacity to endure, suffer, and persist.”54
Rethinking the meaning of agency in relationship to black women’s sexu-
ality, I propose to open up the concept of agency by moving away from read-
ings of its equivalence with resistive (sexual) freedom. We might instead read
agency as a facet of complex personhood within larger embedded relations
of subordination. Depending on the historical moment, agency emerges dif-
ferently and operates along divergent nodes of power. Agency then might be
seen as a dialectical capacity for pleasure and pain, exploration and denial, or
for progressive change as well as everyday survival. Through my close read-
ings of interviews with black performers in the pornography industry, we can
observe their differing forms of agency given changing contexts of represen-
tation and circuits of sexual economy.
The tension described above between aspiration and inescapable con-
straint forms the critical spine of this book. Although it is impossible to de-
cipher what early black pornography actors imagined and desired as they
performed during the rise of pornographic photography and film in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth century, it is important to think through the
foundational nature of early pornography as it set the terms for the later per-
formances, labor conditions, and forms of negotiation deployed by black
adult actresses. Chapter 1 examines the fetishization of black women’s bodies
in early pornography and considers how those bodies served as objects of
spectacle, fascination, and disdain within the visual regimes of slavery, colo-
nialism, and Jim Crow. A compulsive desire to sexualize race and to consume
sexual images of black women and men intersected with the rise of commer-
cial pornography, creating a distinct genre that I call “race porn.” Photographs
and films concerning black and black- white sex illuminate how discourses
of racial and sexual difference became calcified during this period. Even in
the most intimate interactions in early pornography racial- sexual borders
are erected, permeated, and then built up again. Deploying what I call a black
feminist pornographic lens, I read the archive of early race porn to contem-
plate the ways in which early black models and actresses may have reached
past the confines of porn texts to provide performances that give us a sur-
prising view of black female sensuality, playfulness, and erotic subjectivity.
Chapter 2 explores the performances of black porn actresses, like Desiree
18 I N T RO D U C T I O N
West, during the “Golden Age” of pornography in the 1970s. Not only did
large- scale social transformations alter racial- sexual borders in the United
States during this period, they also transformed meanings and interactions
around pornography itself, such that newly popularized sexual media be-
came an important site for black women. A combination of white fascination
with black sexuality and African Americans’ desire to express a new, asser-
tive sexual politics resulted in what I call “soul porn,” a genre that power-
fully shaped black women’s performances and labor. Yet as black actresses
became agents in the production of an emergent porn industry, they faced
the anxieties and subjugations of racial fetishism and were sidelined by the
extreme focus on black male sexuality as the archetype for racial- sexual bor-
der crossing.
Throughout its history, technological and social forces have continuously
altered the landscape of the adult industry. In the process technology has
transformed the kinds of texts and modes of production black porn actresses
encountered. Chapter 3 investigates how the adult industry’s adoption of VHS
allowed for the growth of specific markets for black and interracial video. In
this new interracial subgenre black actresses like Jeannie Pepper and Angel
Kelly negotiated ways to assert their performances and professional personas
into a restrictive formula and sometimes hostile terrain. In the early 1990s,
digital media began to shift the production, marketing, and consumption of
pornography, just as the rise of hip hop music began to shift the representa-
tions, discourses, and aesthetics associated with black female sexuality.
Chapter 4 interrogates how the convergence of hip hop and pornography
helped establish the trope of the black working- class woman as “ho.” Deploy-
ing this figure, the porn industry maintained a segregated, niche- oriented
market for black sexuality based on commercial hip hop aesthetics. In the
process, the ho became an inescapable text that black women in porn must
decipher, and an archetype that speaks to black women’s battles to prevail in
the sexual economy. Using what I call “ho theory,” I analyze the representa-
tion of working- class black women’s corporeal labors to insert themselves in
the marketplace of desires, and to both take pleasure in and benefit from the
fetishization of black women’s bodies. In addition, I explore the roles of black
men in hip hop pornography as they are called upon to perform the roles of
pimp or stud in their sex work.
Chapter 5 focuses on the labors of black women performers by asking
what socioeconomic or other forces catalyze them to pursue pornography as
a field of work and site of imagination. How does illicit eroticism, the pro-
cess by which subjects convert sexuality into a usable resource in the face of
B ROW N SU G A R 19
a number of compelling forces and constraints, factor into their motivations
to become porn stars? What do black women in porn identify as the most
desirable, pleasurable, and powerful aspects of the industry? Because money,
sex, and fame are the hydraulic factors in my informants’ articulations of the
need and desire for this work, it is important to unpack how the realities of
the business meet with these expectations.
If chapter 5 is concerned with how aspirations collide with real- life experi-
ences, chapter 6 analyzes these real- life experiences and the particular kinds
of entanglements and pressures black porn actresses report as constitutive
elements of their illicit erotic work. Former and current black porn actresses
speak about the undeniable hurdles pornographic labor poses, and about how
they grapple with issues of marginalization, discrimination, and abuse as they
seek to promote their erotic capital under tremendous constraint in a busi-
ness that profits from their objectification and exploitation. Ultimately, these
sexual laborers expose how black women are made vulnerable by—yet criti-
cally intervene in—the larger sexualized economy of advanced capitalism in
the United States. Black porn workers offer an alternative moral economy
that sheds light on how marginalized people within industries like porn can
cocreate social meanings, challenge conditions, and imagine other worlds.
This book identifies pornography as an important location to think about
sexual culture and racial ideologies, particularly in the context of the sexu-
alization of both popular culture and economic opportunities for women.
As such, it is necessarily in conversation with feminist critics and provides a
launching pad to advance the conversation about the role of pornography in
women’s lives. Pornography is a hugely controversial topic for feminists. For
more than thirty years, feminists have been engaged in a fierce debate, widely
known as the Sex Wars, about pornography’s role in society. The feminist anti-
pornography movement emerged out of radical feminist activism during the
1970s, against what was viewed as the proliferation of explicit, misogynistic
images in the media. Antipornography feminists like Andrea Dworkin and
Catharine MacKinnon defined pornography as equivalent to gendered vio-
lence, believing that pornography was the “subordination of women perfectly
achieved.”55 For them, pornography commodifies rape and endorses and en-
courages men’s abusive sexual desires and violent behaviors toward women.56
Alternately, a diverse coalition of queer, anticensorship, liberal, and sex-
positive feminists rejected the claims of radical antipornography femi-
nists, citing porn as a convenient scapegoat for social- conservative attacks
on sexual dissent. These critics and activists identified pornography not as
a “unified (patriarchal) discourse with a singular (misogynist) impact,” but
20 I N T RO D U C T I O N
rather, as Feminist Anti- Censorship Taskforce member Lisa Duggan con-
tends, as sexual discourse that is “full of multiple, contradictory, layered, and
highly contextual meanings.”57 In other words, viewing practices for por-
nography are varied and dynamic; viewers are not solely abused by porn or
trained for violent, misogynistic behaviors. While the adult industry is shaped
by the problematics of heteronormative, homophobic, transphobic, and racist
corporatist practices, pornography is not a monolithic or static entity. Porn is
dynamic, diverse, and open for revision, including by those on the margins
such as women, sexual minorities, and people of color.
Black feminists have often followed the antiporn feminist critique de-
scribed above, arguing that pornography as an industry perpetuates harm-
ful stereotypes about black women’s sexuality.58 While these black feminist
writers are not wrong, the story is more complex, and black women’s perfor-
mances deserve a more nuanced analysis. Not only do black women’s rep-
resentations in porn include portrayals that sometimes undermine stereo-
types, black actresses often try to capture something quite different from the
meanings normatively attached to their bodies. Moreover, black women in
porn often try to revalue their images and work by fighting for better rep-
resentations, asserting themselves in their roles, attempting to take control
over their products, and helping other black women in the industry. Black
women in porn also see themselves as a mirror for black women porn view-
ers. They imagine their relationship with black female porn fans—the group
from which many of these performers came—as empowering and challeng-
ing to black women’s sexual politics. By including the performers’ voices in
the discussion we can address questions that are vital to black feminisms, such
as the critical significance of pornography for black women’s sexual labor and
its significance for their own fantasy lives.
Before she started working in porn, Jeannie Pepper was a porn fan. She
had watched sex films in X- rated theaters and imagined seeing more black
women like her represented. Yet she also knew that such a move into the
industry would mark her with a deviance that was overdetermined by the
historical construction of black gender and sexuality. While Jeannie has re-
mained critical of the limits placed on black women in the adult industry and
by black respectability politics, she found affiliation with the iconic celebrity
of Josephine Baker. Baker, for Jeannie, represented a story of financial suc-
cess, glamour, mobility, autonomy, and sexual rebellion. Baker, like Jeannie,
was an erotic performer who became an icon. It is crucial to understand the
attractions that draw black women to the pornography business. I suggest that
porn work is part of a long struggle by black women to occupy their bodies.59
B ROW N SU G A R 21
The primary methodological interventions of this project are twofold: first,
I converse with porn actresses directly, listening to their voices and taking
seriously their descriptions of their experiences; second, I read the com-
plexity of their performances in pornographic imagery. Even as more atten-
tion is given to the workings of race in pornography, few have endeavored
to learn about porn’s meanings by looking at the self- presentations and self-
understandings of black women working inside the industry.60 Over more
than ten years of fieldwork, I conducted ethnographic research with nearly
sixty black women, and more than forty others involved in the porn busi-
ness. My research included directors, producers, distributors, agents, crew,
and actors. I talked to black women porn performers while they made dinner
at home, signed autographs at industry conventions, networked and partied
at social events, and prepared for sex scenes on porn sets. As a black woman, I
discovered an affinity with my informants that unsettled the traditional meth-
odological division between researcher and object of study. My informants
trusted me, called on me, and embraced me in their lives. I also became an
advocate for them: I brought my informants to speak to my classes, published
their essays, and strategized with them about how to overcome career and
family hardships. What I found during this decade of fieldwork and personal
interactions challenged the views I had at the start.
For instance I, like many people, thought that women in porn were pri-
marily survivors of sexual abuse who got off a bus in Hollywood and were
whisked away to Porn Valley by some shady pimp. Reading nostalgic accounts
of the “Golden Age” of porn in the 1970s, I also imagined film sets to be an
updated version of Boogie Nights, where playful orgiastic sex ensued between
people who really didn’t care much if the camera was rolling. Instead I found
no single story for the women that enter the porn business. While some ad-
mitted coming from abusive or neglectful family backgrounds, others spoke
about having grounded and loving single or dual- parent households. Where I
expected to see unmitigated eroticism I found work sites that were decidedly
desexualized, where cast and crew moved about with workmanlike focus to
get their movies made on time and, ideally, under budget.
It is only by talking to those involved in the production of pornography
that we can move past some of the myths and categorical generalizations
about the business and its controversial products. As a historian, I wanted to
know more about how black women became part of pornography, and what
the changing regulatory, technological, and social contexts of porn’s develop-
ment over the past century or more meant for black women’s representations,
working conditions, identities, and aspirations. In hunting down long- lost
22 I N T RO D U C T I O N
vintage pornographic images in libraries and private collections, I soon real-
ized that there was a vast missing archive of black pornography and erotica,
and that black women performing in pornography prior to its deregulation
would unfortunately have to remain unknown and, to an extent, unknowable.
As a feminist, I wanted to understand how mainstream pornography,
which appears to be so extremely focused on addressing white heterosexual
male pleasure, is actually experienced by the women involved in making it.
While it was not possible to track down black adult film actresses who worked
prior to the 1980s, I discovered that the women I did contact were willing, if
not eager, to talk about their experiences and to be understood. Like Jeannie
Pepper, they knew that even to speak about their lives and work would chal-
lenge the stigma and silence around these issues for black women. Yet my
informants fiercely desired to be seen and heard, to tell their stories and ex-
plain their performances, especially to another black woman. I had no choice
but to see and hear them. This book is my attempt to recover and redress an
untold dimension of black women’s sexual lives, by letting them speak for
themselves.
The Feminist Porn Book is the first collection to bring together writ-ings by feminist porn producers and feminist porn scholars to engage, challenge, and re-imagine pornography. As collaborating
editors of this volume, we are three porn professors and one porn direc-
tor who have had an energetic dialogue about feminist politics and por-
nography for years. In their criticism, feminist opponents of porn cast
pornography as a monolithic medium and industry and make sweep-
ing generalizations about its production, its workers, its consumers, and
its effects on society. These antiporn feminists respond to feminist por-
nographers and feminist porn professors in several ways. They accuse
us of deceiving ourselves and others about the nature of pornography;
they claim we fail to look critically at any porn and hold up all porn as
empowering. More typically, they simply dismiss out of hand our abil-
ity or authority to make it or study it. But The Feminist Porn Book offers
arguments, facts, and histories that cannot be summarily rejected, by
providing on-the-ground and well-researched accounts of the politics
of producing pleasure. Our agenda is twofold: to explore the emergence
and significance of a thriving feminist porn movement, and to gather
some of the best new feminist scholarship on pornography. By putting
our voices into conversation, this book sparks new thinking about the
richness and complexity of porn as a genre and an industry in a way that
helps us to appreciate the work that feminists in the porn industry are
doing, both in the mainstream and on its countercultural edges.
So to begin, we offer a broad definition of feminist porn, which will
be fleshed out, debated, and examined in the pieces that follow. As both
an established and emerging genre of pornography, feminist porn uses
sexually explicit imagery to contest and complicate dominant represen-
tations of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, ability, age, body type,
and other identity markers. It explores concepts of desire, agency, power,
beauty, and pleasure at their most confounding and difficult, including
pleasure within and across inequality, in the face of injustice, and against
the limits of gender hierarchy and both heteronormativity and homo-
Introduction: The Politics of Producing Pleasure
CONSTANCE PENLEY, CELINE PARREÑAS SHIMIZU,
MIREILLE MILLER-YOUNG, and TRISTAN TAORMINO
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 9 11/14/12 2:24 PM
normativity. It seeks to unsettle conventional definitions of sex, and
expand the language of sex as an erotic activity, an expression of identity,
a power exchange, a cultural commodity, and even a new politics.
Feminist porn creates alternative images and develops its own aes-
thetics and iconography to expand established sexual norms and dis-
courses. It evolved out of and incorporates elements from the genres of
“porn for women,” “couples porn,” and lesbian porn as well as feminist
photography, performance art, and experimental filmmaking. It does
not assume a singular female viewer, but acknowledges multiple female
(and other) viewers with many different preferences. Feminist porn
makers emphasize the importance of their labor practices in production
and their treatment of performers/sex workers; in contrast to norms in
the mainstream sectors of the adult entertainment industry, they strive
to create a fair, safe, ethical, consensual work environment and often cre-
ate imagery through collaboration with their subjects. Ultimately, femi-
nist porn considers sexual representation—and its production—a site
for resistance, intervention, and change.
The concept of feminist porn is rooted in the 1980s—the height of the
feminist porn wars in the United States. The porn wars (also known as
the sex wars) emerged out of a debate between feminists about the role of
sexualized representation in society and grew into a full-scale divide that
has lasted over three decades. In the heyday of the women’s movement
in the United States, a broad-based, grassroots activist struggle over the
proliferation of misogynistic and violent representations in corporate
media was superceded by an effort focused specifically on legally ban-
ning the most explicit, and seemingly most sexist, media: pornography.
Employing Robin Morgan’s slogan, “Porn is the theory, rape is the prac-
tice,” antipornography feminists argued that pornography amounted to
the commodification of rape. As a group called Women Against Pornog-
raphy (WAP) began to organize in earnest to ban obscenity across the
nation, other feminists, such as Lisa Duggan, Nan D. Hunter, Kate Ellis,
and Carol Vance became vocal critics of what they viewed as WAP’s ill-
conceived collusion with a sexually conservative Reagan administration
and Christian Right, and their warping of feminist activism into a moral
hygiene or public decency movement. Regarding antiporn feminism as
a huge setback for the feminist struggle to empower women and sexual
minorities, an energetic community of sex worker and sex-radical activ-
ists joined anticensorship and sex-positive feminists to build the founda-
tion for the feminist porn movement.1
The years that led up to the feminist porn wars are often referred to as
the “golden age of porn,” a period from the early 1970s to the early 1980s,
INTRODUCTION10
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 10 11/14/12 2:24 PM
marked by large budget, high-production-value feature films that were
theatrically released. A group of female porn performers who worked
during the golden age—including Annie Sprinkle, Veronica Vera, Can-
dida Royalle, Gloria Leonard, and Veronica Hart—formed a support
group (the first of its kind) called Club 90 in New York City. In 1984, the
feminist arts collective Carnival Knowledge asked Club 90 to participate
in a festival called The Second Coming, and explore the question, “Is
there a feminist pornography?”2 It is one of the first documented times
when feminists publicly posed and examined this critical query.
That same year, Club 90 member Candida Royalle founded Femme
Productions to create a new genre: porn from a woman’s point of view.3
Her films focused on storylines, high production values, female plea-
sure, and romance. In San Francisco, publishers Myrna Elana and Debo-
rah Sundahl, along with Nan Kinney and Susie Bright, co-founded On
Our Backs, the first porn magazine by and for lesbians. A year later, Kin-
ney and Sundahl started Fatale Video to produce and distribute lesbian
porn movies that expanded the mission that On Our Backs began.4 In the
mainstream adult industry, performer and registered nurse Nina Hartley
began producing and starring in a line of sex education videos for Adam
and Eve, with her first two titles released in 1984. A parallel movement
began to emerge throughout Europe in the 1980s and 90s.5
By the 1990s, Royalle and Hartley’s success had made an impact on
the mainstream adult industry. Major studios, including Vivid, VCA, and
Wicked, began producing their own lines of couples porn that reflected
Royalle’s vision and generally followed a formula of softer, gentler, more
romantic porn with storylines and high production values. The growth
of the “couples porn” genre signified a shift in the industry: female desire
and viewership were finally acknowledged, if narrowly defined. This
provided more selection for female viewers and more opportunities
for women to direct mainstream heterosexual films, including Veron-
ica Hart and Kelly Holland (aka Toni English). Independent, lesbian-
produced lesbian porn grew at a slower pace, but Fatale Video (which
continued to produce new films until the mid-1990s) finally had some
company in its micro-genre with work by Annie Sprinkle, Maria Beatty,
and Shar Rednour and Jackie Strano. Sprinkle also made the first porn
film to feature a trans man, and Christopher Lee followed with a film
starring an entire cast of trans men.6
In the early 2000s, feminist porn began to take hold in the United
States with the emergence of filmmakers who specifically identified
themselves and/or their work as feminist including Buck Angel, Dana
Dane, Shine Louise Houston, Courtney Trouble, Madison Young, and
11INTRODUCTION
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 11 11/14/12 2:24 PM
Tristan Taormino. Simultaneously, feminist filmmakers in Europe began
to gain notoriety for their porn and sexually explicit independent films,
including Erika Lust in Spain; Anna Span and Petra Joy in the UK; Emi-
lie Jouvet, Virginie Despentes, and Taiwan-born Shu Lea Cheang in
France; and Mia Engberg, who created a compilation of feminist porn
shorts that was famously funded by the Swedish government.
The modern feminist porn movement gained tremendous ground in
2006 with the creation of The Feminist Porn Awards (FPAs). Chanelle
Gallant and other staffers at sex-positive sex toy shop Good for Her in
Toronto created the awards, which were open to films that met one or
more of the following criteria:
(1) A woman had a hand in the production, writing, direction, etc.
of the work; (2) It depicts genuine female pleasure; and/or (3) It
expands the boundaries of sexual representation on film and chal-
lenges stereotypes that are often found in mainstream porn. And of
course, it has to be hot! Overall, Feminist Porn Award winners tend
to show movies that consider a female viewer from start to finish.
This means that you are more likely to see active desire and consent,
real orgasms, and women taking control of their own fantasies (even
when that fantasy is to hand over that control).7
These criteria simultaneously assumed and announced a viewership, an
authorship, an industry, and a collective consciousness. Embedded in the
description is a female viewer and what she likely wants to see—active
desire, consent, real orgasms, power, and agency—and doesn’t want to
see: passivity, stereotypes, coercion, or fake orgasms. The language is
broad enough so as not to be prescriptive, yet it places value on agency
and authenticity, with a parenthetical nod to the possibility that not
every woman’s fantasy is to be “in control.” While the guidelines nota-
bly focus on a woman’s involvement in production, honored filmmakers
run the gamut from self-identified feminist pornographers to indepen-
dent female directors to mainstream porn producers; the broad criteria
achieve a certain level of inclusiveness and acknowledge that a range of
work can be read by audiences, critics, and academics as feminist. The
FPA ceremony attracts and honors filmmakers from around the world,
and each year since its inception, every aspect of the event has grown,
from the number of films submitted to the number of attendees. The
FPAs have raised awareness about feminist porn among a wider audi-
ence and helped coalesce a community of filmmakers, performers, and
fans; they highlight an industry within an industry, and, in the process,
nurture this growing movement. In 2009, Dr. Laura Méritt (Berlin) cre-
INTRODUCTION12
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 12 11/14/12 2:24 PM
ated the PorYes campaign and the European Feminist Porn Award mod-
eled on the FPAs. Because the movement has had the most momentum
in Europe and North America, this volume concentrates on the scholar-
ship and films of Western nations. We acknowledge this limitation: for
feminist porn to be a global project, more would need to be done to
include non-Western scholars and pornographers in the conversation.
The work we do now, as scholars and producers, could not exist
without early examinations of the history and context of pornogra-
phy, including Caught Looking: Feminism, Pornography and Censorship
by FACT, the Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force. Linda Williams’s
groundbreaking 1989 Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the
Visible” opened the door for feminist scholars to productively examine
pornography as film and popular culture, as a genre and industry, tex-
tually, historically, and sociologically. Laura Kipnis’s 1996 Bound and
Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America made the
strongest possible case that “the differences between pornography and
other forms of culture are less meaningful than their similarities.”8 Jane
Juffer’s 1996 At Home with Pornography: Women, Sex, and Everyday
Life urged us to pay close attention not just to the hardcore porn typi-
cally consumed by men but to the uses of pornography in the daily lives
of ordinary women. Since 1974 the film magazine Jump Cut has pub-
lished more original scholarship on porn from a pro-sex, anticensorship
perspective than any other media journal and by leading figures in the
field, including Chuck Kleinhans, Linda Williams, Laura Kipnis, Rich-
ard Dyer, Thomas Waugh, Eithne Johnson, Eric Schaefer, Peter Lehman,
Robert Eberwein, and Joanna Russ. More recently, Drucilla Cornell’s
Feminism and Pornography, Linda Williams’s Porn Studies, and Pamela
Church Gibson’s More Dirty Looks: Gender, Pornography and Power
cemented the value of porn scholarship.9 The Feminist Porn Book seeks
to further that scholarship by adding a significant, valuable component:
feminists creating pornography.
In this book, we identify a forty-year-long movement of thinkers,
viewers, and makers, grounded in their desire to use pornography to
explore new sexualities in representation. The work we have collected
here defies other feminist conceptions of sexuality on screen as forever
marked by a threat. That threat is the specter of violence against women,
which is the primary way that pornography has come to be seen. Claim-
ing that explicit sexual representations are nothing but gender oppres-
sion means that pornography’s portrayal of explicit sex acts is a form
of absolute discipline and subjugation for women. Within this frame,
women who watch, study, or work in pornography bear the mark of
13INTRODUCTION
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 13 11/14/12 2:24 PM
false consciousness—as if they dabble in fire while ignoring the risk of
burning.
The overwhelming popularity of women’s erotic literature, illustrated
by the recent worldwide best seller, Fifty Shades of Grey by EL James, and
the flourishing women’s fan fiction community from which it emerged,
proves that there is great demand among women for explicit sexual rep-
resentations. Millions of female readers embraced the Fifty Shades of
Grey trilogy—which follows a young woman who becomes the submis-
sive sexual partner to a dominant man—not for its depiction of oppres-
sion, but for its exploration of erotic freedom. Women-authored erotica
and pornography speaks to fantasies women actually have, fantasies that
are located in a world where women must negotiate power constantly,
including in their imaginations and desires. As with the criteria for win-
ning a Feminist Porn Award, these books and the feminist porn move-
ment show that “women are taking control of their own fantasies (even
when that fantasy is to hand over control).”
With the emergence of new technologies that allow more people than
ever to both create and consume pornography, the moral panic-driven
fears of porn are ratcheted up once again. Society’s dread of women who
own their desire, and use it in ways that confound expectations of proper
female sexuality, persists. As Gayle Rubin shows, “Modern Western
societies appraise sex acts according to a hierarchical system of sexual
value.”10 Rubin maps this system as one where “the charmed circle” is
perpetually threatened by the “outer limits” or those who fall out of the
bounds of the acceptable. On the bottom of this hierarchy are sexual acts
and identities outside heterosexuality, marriage, monogamy, and repro-
duction. She argues that this hierarchy exists so as to justify the privi-
leging of normative and constricted sexualities and the denigration and
punishment of the “sexual rabble.”11 The Feminist Porn Book showcases
precisely these punishable sex acts and identities that are outside of the
charmed circle and proudly sides with the sexual rabble. Spotlighting the
numerous ways people confront the power of sexuality, this book paves
the way for exploring the varieties of what were previously dismissed as
perversities. At the same time, feminist porn can also expose what passes
for “normal” sexuality at the center of that charmed circle.
One of the unfortunate results of the porn wars was the fixing of
an antiporn camp versus a sex-positive/pro-porn camp. On one side, a
capital P “Pornography” was a visual embodiment of the patriarchy and
violence against women. On the other, Porn was defended as “speech,”
or as a form that should not be foreclosed because it might some day be
transformed into a vehicle for women’s erotic expression. The nuances
INTRODUCTION14
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 14 11/14/12 2:24 PM
and complexities of actual lowercase “pornographies” were lost in the
middle. For example, sex-positive thinking does not always accom-
modate the ways in which women are constrained by sexuality. But
the problem with antipornography’s assumption that sex is inherently
oppressive to women—that women are debased when they have sex on
camera—ignores and represses the sexuality of women. Hence, for us,
sex-positive feminist porn does not mean that sex is always a ribbon-tied
box of happiness and joy. Instead, feminist porn captures the struggle to
define, understand, and locate one’s sexuality. It recognizes the impor-
tance of deferring judgment about the significance of sex in intimate and
social relations, and of not presuming what sex means for specific peo-
ple. Feminist porn explores sexual ideas and acts that may be fraught,
confounding, and deeply disturbing to some, and liberating and empow-
ering to others. What we see at work here are competing definitions of
sexuality that expose the power of sexuality in all of its unruliness.
Because feminist porn acknowledges that identities are socially situ-
ated and that sexuality has the power to discipline, punish, and subju-
gate, that unruliness may involve producing images that seem oppressive,
degrading, or violent. Feminist porn does not shy away from the darker
shades of women’s fantasies. It creates a space for realizing the contradic-
tory ways in which our fantasies do not always line up with our politics
or ideas of who we think we are. As Tom Waugh argues, participation in
pornography, in his case as spectator, can be a “process of social identity
formation.”12 Indeed, social identities and ideas are formed in the act of
viewing porn, but also in making and writing about it.
Strongly influenced by other social movements in the realm of sexu-
ality, like the sex-positive, LGBT rights, and sex workers’ rights move-
ments, feminist porn aims to build community, to expand liberal views
on gender and sexuality, and to educate and empower performers and
audiences. It favors fair, ethical working conditions for sex workers and
the inclusion of underrepresented identities and practices. Feminist porn
vigorously challenges the hegemonic depictions of gender, sex roles, and
the pleasure and power of mainstream porn. It also challenges the anti-
porn feminist interpretive framework for pornography as bankrupt of
progressive sexual politics. As a budding movement, it promotes aes-
thetic and ethical practices that intervene in dominant sexual represen-
tation and mobilize a collective vision for change. This erotic activism,
while in no way homogeneous or consistent, works within and against
the marketplace to imagine new ways to envision gender and sexuality
in our culture.
But feminist porn is not only an emergent social movement and an
15INTRODUCTION
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 15 11/14/12 2:24 PM
alternative cultural production: it is a genre of media made for profit. Part
of a multibillion dollar business in adult entertainment media, feminist
porn is an industry within an industry. Some feminist porn is produced
independently, often created and marketed by and for underrepresented
minorities like lesbians, transgender folks, and people of color. But femi-
nist porn is also produced within the mainstream adult industry by fem-
inists whose work is funded and distributed by large companies such
as Vivid Entertainment, Adam and Eve, and Evil Angel Productions.
As outliers or insiders (or both) to the mainstream industry, feminists
have adapted different strategies for subverting dominant pornographic
norms and tropes. Some reject nearly all elements of a typical adult film,
from structure to aesthetics, while others tweak the standard formula
(from “foreplay” to “come shot”) to reposition and prioritize female sex-
ual agency. Although feminist porn makers define their work as distinct
from mainstream porn, it is nonetheless viewed by a range of people,
including people who identify as feminist and specifically seek it out, as
well as other viewers who don’t. Feminist porn is gaining momentum
and visibility as a market and a movement. This movement is made up of
performers turned directors, independent queer producers, politicized
sex workers, porn geeks and bloggers, and radical sex educators. These
are the voices found here. This is the perfect time for The Feminist Porn
Book.
In this book, we place academics alongside and in conversation with
sex industry workers to bridge the divide between rigorous research and
critique, and real world challenges and interventions. In Jill Nagle’s semi-
nal work Whores and Other Feminists, she announced, “This time . . .
sex worker feminists speak not as guests, nor as disgruntled exiles, but
as insiders to feminism.”13 As in Nagle’s collection, here those working in
the porn industry speak for themselves, and their narratives illuminate
their complicated experiences, contradict one another, and expose the
damaging one-dimensional rhetoric of the antiporn feminist resurgence.
Like feminist porn itself, the diverse voices in this collection challenge
entrenched, divisive dichotomies of academic and popular, scholar and
sex worker, pornographer and feminist.
In the first section of the book, Making Porn, Debating Porn, feminist
porn pioneers Betty Dodson, Candida Royalle, and Susie Bright give a
grounded history of feminist porn as it emerged in the 1980s in response
to the limiting sexual imagination of both mainstream porn and anti-
porn feminism. Providing a window into the generative and deeply con-
tested period of the sex wars, these feminist pornographers highlight the
stakes and energies surrounding the birth of feminist porn activism in
INTRODUCTION16
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 16 11/14/12 2:24 PM
the face of an antiporn feminism that ignored, misunderstood, or vilified
them and their efforts. Bright’s account of watching her first porn film,
sitting among suspicious men in a dark adult theater, sets the stage for
how the invention of the VHS player shifted women’s consumption of
porn and dramatically changed the marketplace.
In the last decade, a new war on porn has been resurrected and rede-
fined by Gail Dines, Sheila Jeffries, Karen Boyle, Pamela Paul, Robert
Jensen, and others. Feona Attwood and Clarissa Smith show how this
resurgent antiporn movement resists theory and evidence, and tenden-
tiously reframes the production and consumption of porn as a mode of
sex trafficking, a form of addiction, or a public health problem of epi-
demic proportions. Attwood and Smith’s work powerfully exposes how
feminist porn remains challenged and often censored in contemporary
popular discourse. Lynn Comella focuses on the consequences of por-
nography going public. She examines one of the most significant ele-
ments of the emergence of feminist porn: the growth of sex-positive,
women-owned-and-run sex shops and a grassroots sex education move-
ment that create space for women to produce, find, and consume new
kinds of pornography.
Watching and Being Watched examines how desire and agency
inform pornographic performance, representation, and spectatorship.
Sinnamon Love and Mireille Miller-Young explore the complex position
of African American women as they watch, critique, and create repre-
sentations of black women’s sexuality. Dylan Ryan and Jane Ward take up
the concept of authenticity in porn: what it means, how it’s read, and why
it is (or is not) crucial to feminist porn performance and spectatorship.
Ingrid Ryberg looks at how public screenings of queer, feminist, and les-
bian porn can create spaces for sexual empowerment. Tobi Hill-Meyer
complicates Ryberg’s analysis by documenting who, until very recently,
was left out of these spaces: trans women. Keiko Lane echoes Ryberg’s
argument of the radical potential of queer and feminist porn and offers
it as a tool for understanding and expressing desire among marginalized
communities.
The intersection of feminist porn as pedagogy and feminist pedago-
gies of porn is highlighted in Doing It In School. As porn scholars, Con-
stance Penley and Ariane Cruz grapple with teaching and studying porn
from two very different perspectives. Kevin Heffernan offers a history of
sex instruction in film and contrasts it with work from Nina Hartley and
Tristan Taormino in educational porn movies. Hartley discusses how
she has used porn to teach throughout her twenty-five-plus years in the
industry, and Taormino outlines her practice as a feminist pornographer
17INTRODUCTION
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 17 11/14/12 2:24 PM
offering organic, fair-trade porn that takes into account the labor of its
workers. Performer Danny Wylde documents his personal experiences
with power, consent, and exploitation against a backdrop of antiporn
rhetoric. Lorelei Lee offers a powerful manifesto that demands we all
become better students in order to achieve a more nuanced, discerning,
and thoughtful discourse about porn and sex.
Now Playing: Feminist Porn takes up questions of hyper-
corporeality, genderqueerness, transfemininity, feminized masculinity,
transgressive racial performance, and disability. Jiz Lee discusses how
they14 use their transgressive female body and genderqueer identity to
defy categories. April Flores describes herself as “a fat Latina with pale
skin, tattoos, and fire engine red hair,” and gives her unique take on
being (and not being) a Big Beautiful Woman (BBW) performer. Bobby
Noble explores the role of trans men and the interrogation of mascu-
linities in feminist porn, while renowned trans male performer Buck
Angel explodes sex/gender dichotomies by embodying his identity of
a man with a vagina. Also concerned with the complex representation
and performance of manhood in feminist pornography, Celine Parreñas
Shimizu asks how race shapes the work of straight Asian male performer
Keni Styles. Loree Erickson, a feminist pornographer and PhD candi-
date, represents not only a convergence of scholarship and sex work, but
one of the most overlooked subjects in pornography and one de-erot-
icized in society: “queer femmegimp.” Emerging to speak from group
identities previously missing or misnamed, the pieces in this section are
by people who show the beauty of their desires, give shape to their reali-
ties, reject and reclaim attributions made by others, and describe how
they create sexual worlds that denounce inequality.
Throughout the book, we explore the multiple definitions of feminist
porn, but we refuse to fix its boundaries. Feminist porn is a genre and a
political vision. And like other genres of film and media, feminist porn
shares common themes, aesthetics, and goals even though its parameters
are not clearly demarcated. Because it is born out of a feminism that is
not one thing but a living, breathing, moving creation, it is necessar-
ily contested—an argument, a polemic, and a debate. Because it is both
genre and practice, we must engage it as both: by reading and analyzing
its cultural texts and examining the ideals, intentions, and experiences
of its producers. In doing so, we offer an alternative to unsubstantiated
oversimplifications and patronizing rhetoric. We acknowledge the com-
plexities of watching, creating, and analyzing pornographies. And we
believe in the radical potential of feminist porn to transform sexual rep-
resentation and the way we live our sexualities.
INTRODUCTION18
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 18 11/14/12 2:24 PM
Notes
1. Robin Morgan, “Theory and Practice: Pornography and Rape,” in Take Back the
Night, ed. Laura Lederer (New York: William Morrow, 1980), 139. On the porn wars
or sex wars, see Carolyn Bronstein, Battling Pornography: The American Feminist
Antipornography Movement, 1976–1986 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University
Press, 2011); Lisa Duggan and Nan D. Hunter, Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Politi-
cal Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995); Carole Vance, ed. Pleasure and Danger:
Exploring Female Sexuality (Boston and London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984);
Pamela Church Gibson and Roma Gibson, eds., Dirty Looks: Women, Pornography
and Power (London: British Film Institute, 1993); and the documentary film by Har-
riet Koskoff, Patently Offensive: Porn Under Siege (1991).
2. Annie Sprinkle, Post-Porn Modernist: My 25 Years as a Multimedia Whore (San
Francisco: Cleis Press, 1998), 149–51.
3. Annette Fuentes and Margaret Schrage, “Deep Inside Porn Stars,” Jump Cut: A
Review of Contemporary Media 32 (1987): 41–43, http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/
onlinessays/JC32folder/PornWomenInt.html.
4. Susie Bright, Big Sex, Little Death: A Memoir (Berkeley: Seal Press, 2011) and
Susie Bright, “A History Of On Our Backs: Entertainment for the Adventurous Les-
bian, The Original: 1984–1990,” http://susiebright.blogs.com/History_of_OOB .
See also, “About Fatale Media,” accessed September 5, 2011, http://www.fatalemedia.
com/about.html.
5. Feminists in Europe who used sexually explicit photography and film to
explore themes like female pleasure, S/M, bondage, gender roles, and queer desire
include Monika Treut (Germany), Cleo Uebelmann (Switzerland), Krista Beinstein
(Germany and Austria), and Della Grace (England). In 1998, Danish film produc-
tion company Zentropa wrote the Puzzy Power Manifesto that outlined its guide-
lines for a new line of porn for women, which echoed Royalle’s vision: their films
included plot-driven narratives that depicted foreplay and emotional connection,
women’s pleasure and desire, and male and female bodies beyond just their genitals.
See Laura Merrit, “PorYes! The European Feminist Porn Movement,” [unpublished
manuscript] and Zentropa, “The Manifesto,” accessed January 29, 2012, http://www.
puzzypower.dk/UK/index.php/om-os/manifest.
6. In addition, we must acknowledge the early work of Sachi Hamano, the first
woman to direct “pink films” (Japanese softcore porn). Hamano directed more than
three hundred in the 1980s and 90s in order to portray women’s sexual power and
agency, and challenge the representation of women as sex objects only present to
fulfill men’s fantasies. See Virginie Sélavy, “Interview with Sachi Hamano,” December
1, 2009, http://www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk/features/2009/12/01/interview-
with-sachi-hamano/.
7. Feminist Porn Awards, accessed September 5, 2011, http://goodforher.com/
feminist_porn_awards.
8. Laura Kipnis, Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in
America (New York: Grove Press, 1996), viii.
9. See Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force, Caught Looking: Feminism, Pornog-
raphy and Censorship, 3rd ed. (New Haven, CT: LongRiver Books, [1986] 1992);
Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1989); Jane Juffer, At Home with Pornography:
Women, Sex, and Everyday Life (New York: NYU Press, 1998); Jump Cut: A Review
19INTRODUCTION
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 19 11/14/12 2:24 PM
of Contemporary Media, eds. Julia Lesage, Chuck Kleinhans, John Hess (http://www.
ejumpcut.org); Drucilla Cornell, ed., Feminism and Pornography (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2000); Linda Williams, ed., Porn Studies (Durham, NC: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2004); and Pamela Church Gibson, ed., More Dirty Looks: Gender, Por-
nography and Power (London: British Film Institute, 2004).
10. Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexu-
ality,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance (Bos-
ton and London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 279.
11. Rubin, “Thinking Sex,” 280.
12. Tom Waugh, “ Homoerotic Representation in the Stag Film 1920–1940: Imag-
ining An Audience,” Wide Angle 14, no. 2 (1992): 4.
13. Jill Nagle, ed., Whores and Other Feminists (New York and London: Routledge,
1997), 3. Emphasis in original text.
14. Lee’s favored gender-neutral pronoun.
INTRODUCTION20
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I
MAKING PORN, DEBATING PORN
I
MAKING PORN, DEBATING PORN
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 21 11/14/12 2:24 PM
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 22 11/14/12 2:24 PM
Artist, author, and sexologist Betty Dodson has been one of the prin-
cipal advocates for women’s sexual pleasure and health for over three
decades. After her first one-woman show of erotic art in 1968, Dod-
son produced and presented the first feminist slide show of vulvas
at the 1973 NOW Sexuality Conference in New York City where she
introduced the electric vibrator as a pleasure device. For twenty-five
years, she ran Bodysex Workshops, teaching women about their bod-
ies and orgasms. Her first book, Liberating Masturbation: A Meditation
on Selflove, became a feminist classic. Sex for One sold over a million
copies. Betty and her young partner Carlin Ross continue to provide
sex education at dodsonandross.com. This piece is excerpted from
Dodson’s memoir, My Romantic Love Wars: A Sexual Memoir.
When it comes to creating or watching sexual material, women are still debating what is acceptable to make, view, or enjoy. The porn wars rage on while most guys secretly beat off to whatever
turns them on. Meanwhile, far too many feminists want to control or
censor porn. Most people will agree that sex is a very personal matter,
but now that sexual imagery has become prevalent with Internet porn
available on our computers 24/7, I’d say—like it or not—porn is here to
stay.
The fact that pornography is a multibillion-dollar industry and the
engine that first drove the Internet proves that most people want to see
images of sex whether they admit it openly or not. After women’s sex-
ual liberation got underway in the sixties and seventies, women turned
against each other to debate whether an image was erotic or porno-
graphic. Unfortunately this endless and senseless debate continues today.
My first attempt at drawing sex was a real eye opener. In 1968, I had
my first one-woman show of erotic art titled The Love Picture Exhibition.
The experience raised my awareness of the many people who enjoyed
seeing beautiful drawings of couples having intercourse and oral sex.
Porn Wars
BETTY DODSON
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 23 11/14/12 2:24 PM
With my second show—of masturbating nudes—all hell broke loose.
The show not only ended my gallery affiliation, but it was then that I
became aware of how ignorant most Americans were about human sex-
uality. My six-foot drawing of a masturbating woman holding an electric
vibrator next to her clitoris—an erect one at that—might have been the
first public appearance of the clitoris in recent history. It was 1970—the
year I became a feminist activist determined to liberate masturbation.
In 1971, I had my first encounter with censorship when Evergreen
magazine published images of my erotic art. A Connecticut district
attorney threatened to issue an injunction if the magazine was not
removed from the local public library. My friend and former lover Grant
Taylor drove us to Connecticut to meet with the DA. His main objection
was my painting of an all-women orgy. He pounded his fist on the page
spewing out the words, “Lesbianism is a clear sign of perversion!”
When the meeting ended, the press descended on me. I don’t recall
what I said except that sex was nice and censorship was dirty and that
kids were never upset by my art, but their parents often were. A few peo-
ple complimented me on my words and art. One woman said she found
my art “disgusting and pornographic,” but that I had a right to show it.
Her comment was the most upsetting. Driving home, I remember ask-
ing Grant how anyone could call my beautifully drawn nudes disgust-
ing: “Why can’t people distinguish between art that’s erotic and art that’s
pornographic?”
“Betty, it’s all art,” he said. “Beauty or pornography will always be in
the eyes of the beholder.” He went on to warn me against making the
mistake of trying to define either one. It was an intellectual trap that led
to endless debates with no agreements in sight. After thinking about it,
I knew he was right! That night I decided to forget about defining erotic
art as being superior to pornographic images. Instead, I embraced the
label “pornographer.” All at once, I felt exhilarated by the thought that I
could become America’s first feminist pornographer.
The next day, I got out my dictionary and found the word pornography
originated from the Greek pornographos: the writings of prostitutes. If
society treated sex with any dignity or respect, both pornographers and
prostitutes would have status, which they obviously had at one time. The
sexual women of antiquity were the artists and writers of sexual love.
Since organized religions have made all forms of sexual pleasure evil, no
modern equivalent exists today. As a result, knowledge of the esteemed
courtesans was lost, buried in our collective unconscious, suppressed by
the authoritarian organized religions that consistently excluded women.
The idea of reclaiming women’s sexual power by creating pornogra-
BETTY DODSON24
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 24 11/14/12 2:24 PM
phy was a heady concept. Feminists could restore historical perspectives
of the ancient temple priestesses of Egypt, the sacred prostitutes, the
Amazons of Lesbos, and the royal courtesans of the Sumerian palaces.
Sexual love was probably what people longed for, so I gave myself per-
mission to break the next thousand rules of social intimidation aimed
at controlling women’s sexual behavior. I did just that and continue to
do so to this day. In order for women to progress, we must question
all authority, be willing to challenge any rule aimed at controlling our
sexual behavior, and avoid doing business as usual, thereby maintaining
the status quo.
After I fully enjoyed the United States’ brief outbreak of sexual free-
doms that began at the end of the 1960s, my glorious group sex par-
ties allowed me to realize how many women were faking orgasms. So
in 1971, I designed the Bodysex Workshops to teach women about sex
through the practice of masturbation. It was sexual consciousness-rais-
ing at its best as we went around the circle with each woman answering
my question: “How do you feel about your body and your orgasm?” We
also eliminated genital shame by looking at our own vulvas and each
other’s. Finally, we learned to harness the power of the electric vibra-
tor with the latest techniques for self-stimulation during our all-women
masturbation circles.
The Bodysex Workshops continued over the next twenty-five years.
They took a lot out of me; I ended up sacrificing my hip joints to women’s
sexual liberation! These groups also offered unique fieldwork in female
masturbation, a subject rarely researched in academia, and I ended up
with a PhD in sexology.
In 1982 at the age of fifty-three, I joined a support group of lesbian
and bisexual women who were into consensual S/M. Perhaps I had
avoided this small subculture because I suspected there was something
unhealthy about mixing pain with pleasure. Instead of finding sick, con-
fused women, I discovered a group of feminists who were enjoying the
most politically incorrect sex imaginable. One of our first big mistakes
as feminists was to establish politically correct sex, defined as the ideal of
love between equals with both partners remaining monogamous.
For heterosexual women, politically correct sex put us in the age old
bind of trying to change men by getting them to shape up and settle
down. That meant men had to also practice monogamy—a project that
has consistently failed for centuries. Most men are hardwired to have
multiple sex partners while women who want children need a more last-
ing and secure relationship in order to raise a family. Those of us who
remained single also wanted multiple sex partners. Our efforts to expand
25PORN WARS
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 25 11/14/12 2:24 PM
the idea of feminist sex were censored by mainstream feminists and the
media at every turn.
The night of my first S/M meeting, I entered the small apartment and
as I looked around the room, I didn’t see one familiar face among these
younger women. My internal dialogue was like a broken record: “They’re
probably all lesbian separatists and the minute they find out I’m bisexual,
they won’t let me join.” I’d been discriminated against so many times in
the past that the chip on my shoulder weighed heavily. As I sat there
wallowing in my anticipated rejection, I visually fell into lust with every
woman there. What a marvelous variety from stone butch to lipstick les-
bians. When the meeting began, each woman introduced herself, then
stated whether she was dominant or submissive, and said a few words
about how she liked to play. The closer they got to me, the faster the
butterflies in my belly fluttered. When all eyes were on me, I defensively
said, “I’m a bisexual lesbian who’s into self-inflicted pleasure!”
Several women smiled. One asked how I inflicted my pleasure, and
when I said it was with an electric vibrator, the room broke up laughing.
A group of lesbian and bisexual feminists who were willing to explore
kinky sex was my fondest dream come true and within no time, I was
right at home.
Gradually I began to understand that all forms of sex were an
exchange of power, whether it was conscious or unconscious. My focus
had been on the pleasure in sex, not the power. The basic principle of
S/M was that all sexual activity between one or more adults had to be
consensual and required a verbal negotiation, followed by an agreement
between the players. All my years of romantic sex, when we tried to read
each other’s minds, were basically nonconsensual sex. Romantic love
is one of the most damaging concepts on the planet for women—little
girls raised on Disney’s Sleeping Beauty are taught to wait for a prince to
awaken them.
By the time I was in my midthirties and sport fucking, I learned to
take control and be a top as a means of getting what I wanted. But none
of these sexual activities were ever discussed or agreed upon openly. As I
looked at sexuality in terms of this power dynamic, it felt like I was wak-
ing from a deep sleep.
That spring, Dorothy, the founding mother of our group, invited me
to join her at a conference organized by Women Against Pornography
(WAP). Her commitment to feminism was contagious and she was aware
of all the current happenings in the movement. By then I had dropped
out of feminism so I was learning a lot from Dorothy, a thirty-year-old
radical lesbian who had been trashed by other feminists because of her
BETTY DODSON26
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 26 11/14/12 2:24 PM
S/M sexual preferences. As a post-menopausal hedonist in my fifties, I
looked forward to my first public feminist forum dressed as a leather
dyke.
The two of us trooped into the WAP conference arm in arm, wearing
boots and jeans with large silver studded belts under our black leather
jackets—high-visibility leather dykes sitting in the front row just to the
left of the podium. The women glared at us, signaling that we were out
of place, while we wore our political incorrectness like a badge of honor.
At the time, I had difficulty taking this group seriously. After femi-
nists had fought against censoring information about birth control,
abortion, sexuality, and lesbianism, the idea that there was now a group
that wanted to censor pornography seemed absurd. Surely WAP was
only a small percentage of feminists, but Dorothy said they were gain-
ing strength and growing in numbers. Ms. magazine had contributed
money to WAP, and under pressure from members, NOW (National
Organization for Women) had approved a resolution that condemned
pornography without defining it. Several local NOW chapters actively
supported WAP. Censorship was coiled like a rattlesnake ready to strike
at our freedom and poison people’s enjoyment of masturbating while
looking at pictures of sex. Unbelievable!
The large meeting room at NYU was packed with women only—
nearly a thousand had assembled. A red cloth banner with big black
letters stretched across the back of the stage: WOMEN AGAINST PORNOG-
RAPHY. That had to cost a pretty penny. There was also a first-rate sound
system, along with expensive printed flyers—all done very profession-
ally. This was no makeshift feminist conference where we had mimeo-
graphed handouts. Dorothy leaned in close and asked, “When have you
ever seen a conference dealing with women’s issues that had this kind
of money behind it?” We both agreed that WAP most likely had been
secretly funded by the CIA, the Christian Right, or both. The Good Old
Boys were setting us up again—divide and conquer!
Drifting into a reverie, I thought about the 1973 NOW Sexuality
Conference. I remembered how brave we’d been, questioning sex roles
and sexual taboos, exploring female sexual pleasure, and daring to create
better sex lives for women with information and education. We’d been so
sex positive and filled with excitement that we would change the world.
How, in just ten short years, could we have ended up against pornog-
raphy, which put feminists in the same bed as Christians preaching the
gospel?
The WAP conference featured many speakers. Each gave a brief, per-featured many speakers. Each gave a brief, per-
sonal history, and nearly every one had a horror story of sexual abuse at
27PORN WARS
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 27 11/14/12 2:24 PM
the hands of a father, brother, husband, lover, or boss. There were stories
of rape, battered wives, child abuse, harassment, and forced prostitution.
Dorothy was busy taking notes while I sat there stunned by the realiza-
tion that I was in the midst of an orgy of suffering, angry women. Each
speaker’s words and tears were firing up the group into a unified rage.
Emotionalism without intellect from victims without power was how
lynch mobs and nationwide hate groups were formed—the basic strat-
egy of fascism, I concluded with a shiver.
It saddened me to hear how these women had suffered, and I would
never deny that their pain was real. For most of them, sex had truly been
a misery or a violent trauma. No sane person was for rape or incest, but
this one-dimensional attack on images of sex was totally unacceptable.
Blaming pornography as the sole cause of women’s sexual problems was
ludicrous. Why weren’t they going after big problems like war, poverty,
organized religion, and sexual ignorance due to the total absence of
decent sex education in our school system?
An attractive blonde in her midthirties stood at the mic. With her
rage barely controlled, she described her childhood sexual abuse. Every
Saturday when her mother pulled out of the driveway to do the grocery
shopping, her father got out his “disgusting, filthy pictures” and forced
her to perform an “unnatural act.” She didn’t say what it was, but the
audience was surely fantasizing an adult penis penetrating an eleven-
year-old girl. The whole room was emotionally whipped up into a rage
with their own private images of child rape, while at the same time, rev-
eling in the awfulness of it.
The speaker went on to blame the entire incident on pornography!
There was no mention of society’s denial of sexual expression, especially
masturbation. Maybe the father was a devout Catholic who knew he’d
go to hell if he took hold of his own penis. How about the nuclear fam-
ily taking some of the blame with its restrictive sexual mores? But none
of these other possibilities occurred to her. She was adamant that “dirty
pictures” had been the sole cause of her incest.
The WAP meeting ended with an open mic session, and within
moments, emotional chaos broke loose. Women were crying and
screaming hysterically, so we got out fast. Once outside, we took a deep
breath to release our own tension. We both felt drained. Although we
disagreed with WAP, they had a right to their opinions even though they
didn’t respect our rights. We remained sexual outlaws.
The 1980s also ushered in AIDS, and the Reagan government was
slow to respond to this looming crisis. How perfect: AIDS ended casual
sex and sent the population back into committed relationships and
BETTY DODSON28
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 28 11/14/12 2:24 PM
monogamy—the glue that binds. Child sexual abuse was rampant and
getting national attention, while no one paid any attention to how pov-
erty was really hurting our kids. Finally women were being heard, but it
was only half the conversation. We were not getting ahead by avoiding
central issues—and we certainly were not liberating our sexualities.
During this time, women showed up at my workshops and broke
down in tears as they began to talk about being sexually abused. Each
time, I would ask them to leave, with the explanation that my groups
were about exploring pleasure, not sexual abuse. They needed to see a
therapist and then come back for a Bodysex Workshop later on. Some
women accused me of having a hard heart, but I simply stayed on mis-
sion of liberating women’s independent orgasms so we could come back
to life—actually and fully.
My Bodysex Workshops were well received, so I decided to film one.
You just can’t beat the moving image; it’s an opportunity to give people
images of what sex might be. The best way for us to learn is to find out
what’s going on with everyone else. My girlfriend and I used a home
video camera, and it took me two years to edit it on two clunky tape
decks. My films were automatically labeled porn, because if you see a
pussy or a penis, it’s porn. But you can’t teach sex without getting explicit,
so, again, I found myself embracing the role of pornographer.
Before the Internet, every time I said “masturbation,” it either sent
folks into gales of laughter or provoked embarrassed looks as they
quickly changed the subject. My articles for magazines were canceled
and interviews for television ended up on the cutting room floor. The
bottom line of sexual repression is the prohibition of childhood mastur-
bation. This humble activity is the basis for all of human sexuality. The
Internet was the first place in my long career that I was not censored.
My old lover Grant ran my first website. At the end, he was classified
as legally blind, and held a magnifying glass, with his nose an inch from
the screen. When I joined forces with law school grad and cyber geek
Carlin Ross, we created a new website. I believe that once Grant met
Carlin, he was able to leave his disintegrating body. He made it to his
eighty-sixth birthday and died proud with his boots on, with the next
upload for my website sitting on his hard drive. I miss him terribly to this
day. We had the most passionate love/hate affair of the century.
Carlin and I offer free, accessible sex information, both visual and
written, to women and men. We call the clips where we show sexual
skills, “The New Porn.” Sex education must be entertaining, not aca-
demic, dry, boring, or stilted. I’m not afraid of the word porn. If people
29PORN WARS
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 29 11/14/12 2:24 PM
are going to call my explicit sex education porn, then I say embrace the
word. Be the new porn, be the porn you want to see. While it’s true that
a lot of pornography out there is shitty for the most part, it still works:
it gets people hot. The biggest turn on for me is to have a fully orgasmic
partner, not someone pretending or playing. We all know the real deal
when it’s happening—authentic orgasms are unmistakable. I’m a sex-
positive feminist, liberating women one orgasm at a time.
Our site represents a new feminist sexual politics that’s well beyond
any victimhood of rape and sexual abuse. We represent orgasmic
feminism—a new movement of women who have taken control of our
sex lives, and who dare to design them in any way we choose whether
we’re straight, bi, lesbian, or a combination, and we can enjoy our bodies
in any way we desire.
Recently, I love answering sex questions for free from all kinds of
young, middle-aged, and older women, as well as boys and men. I’m
learning about the concerns and sexual problems of Americans and
people from around the world. Let me tell you: sexuality is in a lot of
trouble. Young women today do not know what, when, where, or how to
have an orgasm. Many of them have grown up without childhood mas-
turbation, thanks to the growing influence of religion and the censor-
ship of sexual information. Without access to proper sexual information,
porn has been their primary form of sex education. The issue here is that
the most readily available porn is basically entertainment for men. One
young woman said she was sure she’d never had an orgasm because she’d
never ejaculated. Unfortunately, the G-spot has become the new name
for vaginal orgasms. It’s unfortunate because a very small percentage of
women squirt when they experience an orgasm. I wrote my first book
to help those few women know that this response was natural. Now we
have a nation of young women trying to learn how to ejaculate.
Well-meaning friends suggest that I should drop the word “feminist,”
and perhaps the entire concept, because feminism is so “old hat.” Young
women today have lost interest in feminism because they believe it’s
antisex and that all feminists are man haters. Let me tell you something,
girlfriends. That’s exactly what the powers-that-be want us to think and
do. Feminism has become a dirty word, and I want to save it, to revive it.
I want feminism to signify a woman who knows what she wants in bed
and gets it. Guys will be saying, “I’ve got to find me a feminist to fuck!”
At eighty-two, I’ve decided to make a documentary based on the
Bodysex Workshops. In a sense, I’m going back to the beginning, to
document the heart of my work. The all-women’s masturbation circle is
BETTY DODSON30
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 30 11/14/12 2:24 PM
my sewing circle. “How do you feel about your body and your orgasm?”
is a question still worth asking and the resulting conversation is one still
worth having. We are there to listen to and honor each woman’s personal
story. We celebrate our independent orgasms without a partner or with
one.
This time around, it will be captured professionally with a film crew
and better quality lighting and sound. I want to document this with the
esteem it deserves, so I can leave the planet happy in the knowledge
that this incredible workshop, designed by the early women who first
attended, will be captured for all to see. It will be my most brilliant work
of art, my Sistine Chapel. Now I have to have the courage to be an old
Crone on film. I’m willing to set an example for seniors who are giving
up on sex way too soon. After all, my ageing body can still see, hear, eat,
drink, laugh, talk, walk, sing, dance, shit, masturbate, fuck, create, draw,
write, and have orgasms!
In my heart, I believe that women and girls will not be self-motivated
and self-possessed if they cannot give themselves orgasms. If they rely on
someone else for sexual pleasure, they are potential victims of whatever
society is pushing as “normal.” Masturbation is a meditation on self-love.
It is essential. Sex-positive feminism is alive and well and we will change
the world. It’s just going to take a bit longer than expected. Viva la Vulva!
31PORN WARS
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 31 11/14/12 2:24 PM
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A sex worker perspective
Filippa Fox
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10.1080/23268743.2018.1434111
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FORUM
A sex worker perspective
Filippa Foxa,b
aSex worker, Australia; bMelbourne School of Population and Global Health, University of Melbourne, Australia
I write this article as a femme academic who works both in the public health sector and in
the sex industry. Due to anti-sex work stigma in both academia and public health, I have
chosen to author this article under a pseudonym. This act of self-erasure speaks to the
epistemic injustice sex workers face in scholarly and policy dialogues about our health.
My own understanding of epistemic injustice is drawn from the work of José Medina
and Gaile Pohlhaus Jr, as well as Miranda Fricker (Fricker 2009; Medina 2011; Pohlhaus
Jr 2012). The notion of epistemic injustice marks those ways in which we can be
harmed in our capacity as knowers when communicating with others (Fricker 2009).
Medina amends Fricker’s original account by arguing for a temporal understanding of
durable epistemic injustices, using the term ‘dominant social imaginary’ to refer to the
mainstream understanding of particular aspects of the world and the limits of that under-
standing. Durable epistemic injustices are those which occur when groups of marginalized
persons fail to be recognized in the dominant social imaginary for long historical periods
as subjects who can speak for themselves (Medina 2011). Pohlhaus Jr uses the term ‘wilful
hermeneutical ignorance’ to describe how, despite epistemic resistance and knowledge
production by marginally situated knowers, ‘dominantly situated knowers nonetheless
continue to misunderstand and misinterpret the world’ (2012, 716).
I am wearily familiar with the longstanding ideological coalition between the religious
right and sex worker exclusionary radical feminism in the United States. Aziza Ahmed
(2011) has written an excellent article on the history of this coalition and its impact on
HIV/AIDS prevention and policy around the world. The current public health policies pro-
posed by this coalition – exemplified by the longstanding anti-prostitution pledge pre-
venting foreign non-governmental organizations from receiving US HIV/AIDS funding if
they do not oppose ‘prostitution’ – make life considerably harder for those of us involved
in the sex industry. At every turn, we are made invisible from dialogues about our own
health and well-being.
One of the most longstanding strategies of sex worker exclusionary radical feminism
has been to insist on a causal relationship between pornography and violence against
women, exemplified by Robin Morgan’s (1980) ‘Theory and Practice: Pornography and
Rape’ and Andrea Dworkin’s (1980) ‘Beaver and Male Power in Pornography’. The small
number of articles that serve as an evidence base for this myth have been discredited
time and time again, and yet the myth itself endures as an all-too-effective discursive strat-
egy for justifying the erasure of sex worker voices from public discourse.
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
CONTACT Filippa Fox filippafoxx@gmail.com Sex worker, Australia; Melbourne School of Population and Global
Health, University of Melbourne, Australia
PORN STUDIES
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We are understood as victims of violence whose knowledge is coerced and therefore
untrustworthy. Those of us who refuse to be victims are seen instead as threats to the
social order – illegitimate, criminal subjects unable to be assimilated into polite society.
Our bodies are understood reductively as vectors of disease; either literally through unsub-
stantiated claims of heightened STI rates, or figuratively as agents of moral decay. To
engage the services of sex workers or to consume the pornography we produce is seen
as morally reprehensible. It is assumed that we are all cisgender women who exist in con-
trast to good wives and good mothers in monogamous, reproductive sexual relationships.
We are seen as a threat to these relationships. Just as our bodies are believed to be infec-
tious, we are believed to pollute the social environment, encouraging violence and under-
mining the heteronormative family unit. We are constructed both as helpless victims and
as powerful manipulators of the social order.
This construction of the sex worker subject did not arise with the coalition between the
religious right and sex worker exclusionary radical feminism. It has been with us since at
least the earliest stages of British imperialism exemplified by the 1864 Contagious Diseases
Act in British-occupied India. In the dominant social imaginary, we have been understood
for a long historical period as subjects unable to speak or reason for ourselves.
It is because of this durable epistemic injustice that it does not occur to many non-sex
workers that we have uniquely useful, nuanced, and plural perspectives on our own health
and work. Although we actively resist, most non-sex workers continue to dismiss the epis-
temic resources we develop. They maintain their ignorance about our lives while simul-
taneously claiming to have expertise over them. For sex workers who experience
compounding historical injustices, such as transfemme workers, Indigenous and First
Nations workers, or Black workers, this ongoing exclusion from the dominant social ima-
ginary is even more thorough and violent.
The coalition between the religious right and sex worker exclusionary radical feminism
in the United States is effective precisely because it can comfortably expect non-sex
workers not to have access to sex worker perspectives. Non-sex workers who may not
share the political orientation of the religious right may nevertheless find it easier to
believe what the dominant social imaginary says about pornography than to seek out
the epistemic resources developed by porn workers.
Sex workers remain stigmatized and hidden from the dominant social imaginary in
ways which make it hard for others to understand us as potential conversational partners
with expert knowledge about our own lives. The social epistemological perspective I have
traced here clarifies how the marginalization of sex workers makes possible the endurance
of myths which are at odds with our lived experience. This perspective also clarifies the
wilful failure of dominantly situated persons to use the epistemic resources we develop.
Furthermore, the erasure of porn and other sex workers from the ongoing public dialo-
gue about pornography and health prevents us from addressing the very real health crises
which we do face. At present, I live and work in Australia in a jurisdiction where sex work is
legalized and licensed. Unlicensed and non-compliant workers continue to face criminaliza-
tion and punitive interference by the police. The Australian healthcare system provides ade-
quate care to a greater proportion of marginalized people, including sex workers;
nonetheless, sex work stigma regularly affects the quality of the care we receive.
Mikey Way, Australian porn worker and activist, noted to me in conversation:
198 F. FOX
Medical practitioners here have no knowledge of the standard practices in the porn industry
and often need to be taught them during medical appointments, effectively requiring us to
out ourselves and place ourselves at risk of discriminatory behaviour. On top of that, many
of the things we rely on as porn performers are under-researched – e.g., the effects of men-
strual sponges on physical health, the impact of anal douches and enemas on health, harm
minimization for [consensual] bareback sexual contact, and the success or lack thereof of a
testing-based [STI] transmission prevention method.
Much of what Mikey brought up has parallels in my own experience with other sectors
of sex work: discriminatory behaviour on the part of health professionals, the requirement
to educate doctors, incorrect diagnoses based on false assumptions about risk, and a
dearth of evidence related to my needs and health practices as a worker.
Many of us face even greater barriers accessing mental health care and finding provi-
ders who respect our occupation and do not assume, for example, that we are sex workers
because we have experienced trauma, or that our work is the sole cause of our ill-health.
American porn worker Andre Shakti (2017) addresses a number of similar points related
to sex worker health in her excellent Rewire commentary ‘No One in the Porn Industry Likes
a Broken Vagina’, including the lack of workplace protections, the difficulty of accessing
private insurance in the United States as a sex worker, and the potential legal ramifications
of disclosing sex worker status to health professionals.
As a scholar, activist, and worker dedicated to improving sex worker access to appropriate
and adequate healthcare, I find the language of pornography as a ‘public health crisis’ to be
deeply and deliberately disingenuous. It is the latest strategy in a long history of epistemic
injustice committed against sex workers. Because of the persistent erasure of porn and other
sex workers from the public dialogue on pornography and health, it is difficult for us to join
this conversation and use it is as a platform to improve our own occupational health and
safety. I call this an erasure because I want to be clear that we are having ongoing conversa-
tions about our health. It is the responsibility of health professionals and policy-makers to
listen to us. It is the responsibility of non-sex workers to exhibit epistemic humility and
make an effort to understand and use the epistemic resources we create.
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Ahmed, Aziza. 2011. ‘Feminism, Power, and Sex Work in the Context of HIV/AIDS: Consequences for
Women’s Health.’ Harvard Journal of Law and Gender 34: 226–258.
Dworkin, Andrea. 1980. ‘Beaver and Male Power in Pornography.’ New Political Science 1 (4): 37–41.
Fricker, Miranda. 2009. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Medina, José. 2011. ‘The Relevance of Credibility Excess in a Proportional View of Epistemic Injustice:
Differential Epistemic Authority and the Social Imaginary.’ Social Epistemology 25 (1): 15–35.
Morgan, Robin. 1980. ‘Theory and Practice: Pornography and Rape.’ In Take Back the Night: Women on
Pornography, edited by Laura Lederer, 134–140. New York: William Morrow.
Pohlhaus Jr, Gaile. 2012. ‘Relational Knowing and Epistemic Injustice: Toward a Theory of Willful
Hermeneutical Ignorance.’ Hypatia 27 (4): 715–735.
Shakti, Andre. 2017. ‘No One in the Porn Industry Likes a Broken Vagina.’ Rewire. February 17. Accessed
August 1, 2017. https://rewire.news/article/2017/02/17/no-one-porn-industry-likes-broken-vagina/.
PORN STUDIES 199
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References
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Constructing a crisis: porn panics and public
health
Valerie Webber & Rebecca Sullivan
To cite this article: Valerie Webber & Rebecca Sullivan (2018) Constructing a crisis: porn panics
and public health, Porn Studies, 5:2, 192-196, DOI: 10.1080/23268743.2018.1434110
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INTRODUCTION
Constructing a crisis: porn panics and public health
Valerie Webbera and Rebecca Sullivanb
aCommunity Health & Humanities, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, Canada; bDepartment of
English, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada
Who has the luxury to worry about porn’s impact on health? And who has the power to define
what is ‘healthy sexuality’?
Labelling porn a public health crisis has become the newest tactic for anti-porn activists
seeking to curtail pornography distribution. Thus far, seven American states have declared
pornography a public health crisis and four more have filed similar bills. Hearings on the
matter were held in Canada, although the final decision was that the evidence was too
contradictory to draw any conclusions. Lobbyists in Australia and the United Kingdom
are asking their governments to investigate not so much whether there is a public
health crisis, but to leap ahead and determine how to solve the crisis of pornography.
Yet not one global health agency – the usual experts to identify and define the scope
of a public health issue – supports their claims. Traditionally, the field of public health
has concerned itself with disease prevention by addressing the systemic causes of perva-
sive health problems that impact either a significant majority of people (e.g. sanitation
systems or childhood vaccinations) or the most marginalized segments of a population
(e.g. HIV prevention or safe injection sites). Pornography consumption meets neither of
these criteria. Why then has this debate occupied valuable government time and
resources?
Treating pornography as a ‘public health crisis’ is a gross misallocation of priorities. We
do not believe such claims are motivated by a desire to ensure the physical and social well-
being of the populace. Rather, employing the language of ‘public health’, ostensibly apo-
litical and objective, is a well-devised strategy to impose sexually conservative moral
imperatives. The fact that the public health argument is operationalized primarily by
moral activists with a retrograde understanding of both health and media scholarship,
not by public health professionals or people involved in the pornography industry,
should be enough to give any person pause. Thus, the pieces in this special forum do
not engage with the question ‘is porn a public health crisis’ so much as they critically
reflect upon the catalysts and consequences of this particular turn to public health dis-
course by anti-porn groups.
It is our contention that framing pornography as a health issue is a privileged and pol-
itically motivated misdirection of public health resources. As such, we want to claim our
own space here not to debate on their terms the data, definitions, and untested assump-
tions embedded in that frame. Rather, we regard this effort as an opportunity to diversify
the limited narratives of pornography consumption that presently dominate. The call for
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
CONTACT Valerie Webber valerie.webber@mun.ca
PORN STUDIES
2018, VOL. 5, NO. 2, 192–196
https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2018.1434110
http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1080/23268743.2018.1434110&domain=pdf
mailto:valerie.webber@mun.ca
http://www.tandfonline.com
specific types of ‘evidence’ grants us opportunity to conduct research that makes visible
the experiences of sexual subjectivities which are so often silenced. Indeed, as Filippa
Fox argues, the maintenance of the theory that pornography damages the public’s
health requires the wilful exclusion of the voices of sex workers. This denial that sex
workers are in fact part of ‘the public’ has real and direct consequences on sex workers’
ability to access adequate and respectful healthcare, while health questions of actual rel-
evance to sex workers’ lives go unanswered.
Cicely Marston demonstrates that much of the public health rhetoric about pornogra-
phy begins from the assumption that a healthy sexuality is one that conforms to the social
and cultural conventions of white, settler, heterosexual, middle-class, monogamous pro-
priety. It also singles out pornography as a uniquely and exclusively negative form of
media. Katie Newby and Anne Philpott present ways to think about how explicit sexual
content could be ethically produced and incorporated into sexual health curricula,
especially to discuss consent, safer sex, and distinguishing between visual fantasy and
real-life sex. These efforts by public heath scholars to integrate critical media studies of
sexuality into their research opens up an exciting new vista of academic collaboration
long missing from the media effects models that have dominated public health and
social psychology studies.
If porn is a public health crisis, then, what exactly are the health outcomes of watching
too much pornography? That is the fundamental stumbling block of anti-porn advocates.
David Ley, an American sex therapist, outlines a series of epistemological and methodo-
logical fallacies that are central to anti-porn claims about the health risks of porn. While
the science of porn addiction and negative neurological effects is contentious at best,
there is something well worth studying here: that is, the shift in political lobbying from
claims of undiagnosable ‘harms’ to women and children, to insisting that young men
are the unwilling victims of a runaway epidemic of pornography. Very little of the
public health debates even acknowledges that porn may be consumed by young
women, or that it has particular and distinct saliency for LGBTQ2IA+ youth. Indeed, as
Madita Oeming points out, the conversation of porn’s supposed harms revolves largely
around the mainstream white, heterosexual, cisgendered male, a victim of his own limit-
less capacity for porn consumption. Diseases of over-consumption are quintessentially
moral, not health crises. They require and invoke a class of passive and entitled consumers
whose supposed well-being outweighs any public or occupational health programmes to
support porn workers, a phenomenon Heather Berg unravels in her contribution to this
forum.
To suggest that a conversation on the health effects of pornography is a privileged one
is not to say that we do not welcome complex and even contentious academic debate on
sexuality. Sexual norms and cultures are important for health outcomes and therefore
require balanced, thoughtful discussion and consideration of the relationship of sexual
media to sexual health. Indeed, critical media and cultural scholars have been engaged
in this work for decades. Sophisticated qualitative methods for understanding how
youth negotiate their media viewing and integrate it with their sexual becoming is
easily accessible but still poorly integrated even by public health scholars who contest
the anti-porn arguments. Research on sexting (Burkett 2015; Albury 2017), online com-
munication (De Ridder and Van Bauwel 2013; Keller 2015; Naezer 2017), media sexualiza-
tion (McRobbie 2008; Attwood 2010; McKee 2010; Smith 2010; Duits and van Zoonen
PORN STUDIES 193
2011), and porn consumption (Attwood 2005; McKee 2007; Smith 2007; Paasonen et al.
2015) that assemble multifaceted analytical frameworks serves to locate pornography
within a complex matrix of sexual media production, distribution, and consumption. Fur-
thermore, it provides opportunities to integrate sexual media into debates on media lit-
eracy and digital citizenship as something other than a risky behaviour to avoid (Keller
and Brown 2002; Jones and Mitchell 2016). Frameworks already exist to educate children
and youth on healthy media usage, rights and responsibilities of social media engage-
ment, critical meaning-making, and identity self-construction. As these issues spill over
into sexual education curricula, it becomes more urgent that we talk about ethical pro-
duction and consumption of sexual media. Yet educational, medical, religious, and
other social systems (not to mention families) still revert to hand-wringing over media
access rather than considering the wider economic, sociocultural, and historical contexts
in which sexual media are embedded. Without these contexts, we cannot have important
conversations about the realities of porn’s pervasiveness in society – what Brian McNair
calls ‘the pornosphere’ (2002, 35) – and how porn can contribute to broadening, rather
than narrowing, the possibilities for safe and fulfilling sexual lives.
The appropriation of public health legislation by anti-porn advocates also illustrates the
importance of public health ethics. Any interventions on private sexual practices must
balance individual rights and security with the public good. It was a hard lesson learned
in the early stages of the HIV/AIDS epidemic – a true public health crisis, but also one
riddled with stigma and discrimination. As concern over the disease mounted, many
health practitioners, decision-makers, and activists campaigning in the name of public
health considered drastic violations of people’s privacy and autonomy as necessary and
justified. This included interventions such as mandatory testing, reporting, and quarantine,
as well as the closure of community sexual spaces such as bathhouses (Herek 1999;
Disman 2003). It continues today in the form of mandatory testing and reporting
(Webber, Bartlett, and Brunger 2016), blood bans for men who have sex with men
(Cascio and Yomtovian 2013; Arora 2017; Crath and Rangel 2017), and the criminalization
of non-disclosure of one’s HIV status to sexual partners (Mykhalovskiy 2011; O’Byrne,
Bryan, and Woodyatt 2013). HIV is an interesting comparative case study to the current
porn panic because it demonstrates how interventions ostensibly intended to protect
the health of the ‘public’ deliberately privilege specific forms of sexual and relational prac-
tice. Public sexual health campaigns and policies based upon weak evidence are danger-
ous because they conflate moral judgment with health intervention, further ostracizing
sexually non-normative populations while failing to result in any measurable improve-
ments to public health.
As the example of HIV illustrates, it is imperative that public health always first and fore-
most considers the ethical implications of its own practice, in order to balance ‘the need to
exercise power to ensure the health of populations and, at the same time, to avoid abuses
of such power’ (Thomas et al. 2002, 1057). Public health ethics hinges upon defining the
boundaries of the public/private divide. Sexuality, especially with regards to its relation-
ship with pornography, tends to incite chaotic interpretations of ethics because of the
many ways in which it brings ‘the public’ and ‘the private’ into complicated collision
with one another. How the public/private divide is drawn – how the private is perceived
to ooze out and corrupt the public – is an important factor in determining when and how
the collective should be entitled to compel the individual towards ‘healthy’ decisions.
194 V. WEBBER AND R. SULLIVAN
Tragically, the history of public health interventions on people’s sexuality is rife with
abuse: forced sterilizations, false mental health diagnoses, criminalization and incarcera-
tion, dangerous and untested therapeutic interventions, medical incompetence, and
human rights violations. The examples are too long to exhaustively list, but some that
stand out include the Puerto Rican birth control pill trials (1956), the Tuskegee syphilis
experiments conducted on African American men (1932–1972), and the incarceration of
‘promiscuous’ women in Magdalene Laundries (which lasted until the 1990s in some
countries). Abuses like these have disproportionately impacted racialized communities,
sex workers, and sexually non-normative folks. The claims in favour of labelling porn a
public health crisis promise nothing different.
Our reasons for drawing attention to dark chapters in the history of public regulation of
sexuality is not to say that sex should be off-limits to public health officials and experts, but
to insist that we learn from past errors and abuses. People of marginalized genders and
sexualities who have historically encountered stigma and discrimination due to previous
sexual health policies must be consulted and their experiences prioritized. In our own
work, as a public health scholar and a media studies scholar, we seek out sex workers,
LGBTQ2IA+, HIV+ people, and racialized groups unjustly labelled as ‘hypersexual’ as
those who must be heard first and loudest (Webber 2017; Sullivan 2014; Sullivan and
McKee 2015). They were all but absent in recent hearings in Canada, which had substan-
tially more submissions from evangelical leaders and anti-porn organizations than they did
from public health scientists or sexual health harm reduction agencies.
Health can be too easily portrayed as value-free and easily understood. Similarly,
healthy sexuality is often narrowly defined to conform to heteronormative, middle-class,
nuclear family-oriented ideals. When a public health debate that could potentially result
in legislation begins from weak frameworks and over-simplified definitions, the conse-
quences can be catastrophic. As Thomas et al. (2002, 1058) state, the fundamental
ethical principle of public health is that ‘programs and policies should incorporate a
variety of approaches that anticipate and respect diverse values, beliefs, and cultures in
the community’. Porn is a factor of public sexual health, on that point we heartily
concur. However, it is not necessarily intoxicating our youth or decaying social values. It
is also sometimes a path to sexual self-discovery, a vehicle for safer and consensual sex
practices, and a window into the spectrum of gender and sexual diversity. Thus, we can
perhaps express some gratitude to those who began this debate – as deceptively as
they did – so that we can begin to develop public health policies and programmes that
support more expressive, diverse, and inclusive sexualities. The pieces in this forum are
offered as a beginning of a new debate, thoughtfully framed and ethically accountable.
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Albury, Kath. 2017. ‘Just Because It’s Public Doesn’t Mean It’s Any of Your Business: Adults’ and
Children’s Sexual Rights in Digitally Mediated Spaces.’ New Media & Society 19 (5): 713–725.
Arora, Kavita Shah. 2017. ‘Righting Anachronistic Exclusions: The Ethics of Blood Donation by Men
Who Have Sex with Men.’ Journal of Gay & Lesbian Social Services 29 (1): 87–90.
PORN STUDIES 195
Attwood, Feona. 2005. ‘What Do People Do With Porn? Qualitative Research Into the Consumption,
Use, and Experience of Pornography and Other Sexually Explicit Media.’ Sexuality and Culture 9 (2):
65–86.
Attwood, Feona. 2010. Mainstreaming Sex: The Sexualization of Western Culture. London: I.B. Tauris.
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Prevention: Results From an Ottawa-Based Gay Men’s Sex Survey.’ Journal of the Association of
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Webber, Valerie. 2017. ‘“I‘m Not Gonna Run Around and Put a Condom on Every Dick I See”: Tensions
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196 V. WEBBER AND R. SULLIVAN
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-017-9490-2
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-017-9490-2
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References