The Feminist Porn Book

The Politics of Producing Pleasure

Tristan Taormino, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Constance Penley, Mireille Miller-Young, Tristan Taormino, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Constance Penley, Mireille Miller-Young

• Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781558618190
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Human Sexuality in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

"This thrilling anthology brings together scholars, producers, and fans of feminist pornography to define an emerging movement of gender and sexual visionaries." —Lisa Duggan The Feminist Porn Book brings together for the first time writings by feminists in the adult industry and research by feminist porn scholars. This book investigates not only how feminists understand pornography, but also how feminists do porn—that is, direct, act in, produce, and consume one of the world's most lucrative and growing industries. With original contributions by Susie Bright, Candida Royalle, Betty Dodson, Nina Hartley, Buck Angel, Lynn Comella, Jane Ward, Ariane Cruz, Kevin Heffernan, and more, The Feminist Porn Book updates the arguments of the porn wars of the 1980s, which sharply divided the women's movement, and identifies pornography as a form of expression and labor in which women and racial and sexual minorities produce power and pleasure. "Besides being extremely thought-provoking, this must-read collection is accessible to all readers, and the topic inherently makes it engaging and fun." —Publishers Weekly, starred review

I

MAKING PORN, DEBATING PORN

Porn Wars

BETTY DODSON

Artist, author, and sexologist Betty Dodson has been one of the principal advocates for women’s sexual pleasure and health for over three decades. After her first one-woman show of erotic art in 1968, Dodson 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 bodies 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 sexual liberation got underway in the sixties and seventies, women turned against each other to debate whether an image was erotic or pornographic. 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. 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 sexuality. 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 people 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 asking Grant how anyone could call my beautifully drawn nudes disgusting: “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 pornography 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 permission 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 freedoms that began at the end of the 1960s, my glorious group sex parties 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-raising 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 vibrator 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, confused 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 lasting and secure relationship in order to raise a family. Those of us who remained single also wanted multiple sex partners. Our efforts to expand 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 lesbians. 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 waking 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 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 feminists 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 gaining 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 PORNOGRAPHY. That had to cost a pretty penny. There was also a first-rate sound system, along with expensive printed flyers—all done very professionally. This was no makeshift feminist conference where we had mimeographed 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 pornography, which put feminists in the same bed as Christians preaching the gospel?

The WAP conference featured many speakers. Each gave a brief, personal history, and nearly every one had a horror story of sexual abuse at 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 realization that I was in the midst of an orgy of suffering, angry women. Each speaker’s words and tears were firing up...