She was talking about how porn doesn’t show the intimacy and connection that are part of sex. And I 100% agree with her on that, with the exception of a few small companies such as Comstock Films. And as Tony Comstock pointed out on another post, his work places him outside the distribution channels and reach of the rest of the porn world.

At the same time, sex isn’t only about intimacy and connection. Don’t get me wrong- I think that sex with vulnerability and mutual passion is amazing. It can be an amazing experience that deepens a relationship and offers opportunities for growth and transformation. Sex with love is fantastic. And it’s not the only way to have sex.

As far as I’m concerned, sex with mutual liking can also be great. As can sex with mutual respect and shared desires. See, our culture grew out of an amazingly erotophobic pattern that said that sex is bad unless something redeems it. Historically, that meant procreation within (heterosexual) marriage. That has slowly shifted, so that many people today will allow love to redeem sex. But that still rests on the idea that sex needs to be redeemed. And given that there are lots of reasons people have sex in addition to love, that seems like it continues to limit the full expression of healthy desire. (Note: there are some methodological concerns with the research on why people have sex, but I’m more interested in how we deal with the fact that there are lots of reasons to have sex rather than pinning down all of the exact reasons that people have sex.)

You’re not going to see love in much porn. Other than a few individuals, most porn talent aren’t in personal relationships with the people they have sex with on the set. Similarly, you’re also not going to see real love in most non-porn movies. But at least TV and movie actors can act (mostly). There’s a reason the porn industry calls them “talent” rather than actors. And as long as we vilify porn talent, anyone who can actually act isn’t likely to have sex on screen. Yes, we also idolize some porn stars, but that doesn’t change the fact that having sex on camera pretty much paints you into a career corner unless you can stay in the closet about it.

Given that, it’s not surprising that the closest connection that you’ll find in porn is sex with mutual liking and desire. And I can tell you that lots of people say that they would LOVE to see more of that. At GV, we try to find any examples of it that we can, but it’s not easy- there’s not a lot. Nor is it a surprise that most porn scenes are made by people who don’t have any connection at all and sometimes, even dislike each other. They don’t usually get to choose who they’re shooting a scene with.

In my ideal world, we’d actually see more examples of loving, sexual relationships in our everyday lives. That doesn’t mean that we’d see everyone having sex. But as long as we don’t offer role models for how sexual relationships with intimacy and vulnerability can look, there’s nothing to balance things out. As long as we keep everything about sex secret, we won’t have other examples for happy, healthy sexual relationships. And that means that there won’t be anything to help us to understand that we don’t need to model our lives on what we see in porn.

Just for a change, I think it’d be great for more DVDs to have a bonus clip of the talent negotiating what they’re going to do. Something like “My leg cramps in that position. Let’s do this one instead.” Or “I like it when you suck the head of my cock and stroke the shaft.” Or whatever. Anything that lets us see that these are real people having sex.  One of the few DVDs along those lines is the Chemistry series and given how popular it is, I think it shows how much people want to see that.

One of the things that makes that tricky is that deep sexual & emotional connection isn’t easy to film. Anyone can grab a camera and film people fucking. It’s a lot harder to convey the subtle nuances of a relationship. But I can dream.

So, yeah. Porn isn’t going to offer us examples of deep connection, vulnerability and intimacy. That’s not what porn producers are trying to do.

Unrealistic Images

One of the critiques that I hear about porn is that it doesn’t provide realistic models for sex or relationships. And that’s absolutely true. You almost never see people in porn using lube, warming up before having sex (especially anal sex), or asking for something different. Porn sex is pretty formulaic, with activities and positions chosen more for the convenience of the camera than for the pleasure of the participants. People in porn jump right to the chase, usually without any romance, and you rarely see any affection.

At the same time, nothing on TV or movies is ever realistic. Ask a doctor sometime if medical dramas portray medicine accurately. Ask a lawyer if their job looks like what you see on Law & Order. And I don’t think that anyone thinks that Indiana Jones & the Temple of Doom even remotely resembles what archeologists actually do. So why don’t people complain about unrealistic images in these other genres?

I think that the main reason is that, in real life, we have lots of personal experience that shows us that TV isn’t ever realistic. After all, we all know that real life rarely poses challenges that can be solved in an hour. Real life doesn’t come with a killer soundtrack and a montage to get us through the hard work. But in real life, most of us haven’t ever watched people have sex, which means that we don’t have more accurate images of what sex looks like to provide a contrast to what we see in porn.

Learning to have sex from watching porn is about as effective as learning to drive from watching car chase movies. And unfortunately, that’s what our sex education system forces people to do. Rather than helping people learn how to make authentic sexual choices, communicate with a partner, set boundaries or identify their needs, desires, and goals, we withhold information and then shame them for making mistakes. Is it any wonder that people are trying to learn how to have sex from porn?

Porn isn’t any more of a fantasy than a romantic comedy or an action movie is. But until we give people more accurate ideas about sex, there’s no way to balance it out. And to critique porn for doing something that every other genre of entertainment does seems a bit silly to me. After all, there’s no reason to have higher expectations for porn than we do for action movies.

I know that there are plenty of other ways in which some porn is really problematic. There’s a lot of porn that features humiliation of the women involved. (I’ve seen a lot less humiliation in gay porn.) And that really disturbs me. And there’s an increasing amount of humiliation in the media generally. Unscripted TV (formerly called “reality shows” until they realized that it’s not realistic) often includes the humiliation of the participants, especially if it’s a contest show and people’s work is being judged. The issue of sex & shame is a big one and there isn’t much clarity around it. I’m going to write about that another time, but I wanted to make sure that it didn’t get left out.

Unrealistic Bodies

People in porn tend to look pretty similar. Pubic hair, blemishes on the body, and cellulite are mostly absent. Men in porn have large penises that get instantly erect and ejaculate only after having “enough” sex, and the guys are muscular and (if they’re white) tanned. Women in porn are generally young & skinny, they’re always ready for pounding sex and they’re flexible enough to get into those unlikely positions. (This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list of the ways that porn presents unrealistic images of bodies.)

I’d love to see a wider range of bodies in porn. I’d love to see people of more races, ages, sizes, and such. I think it’d be a great thing to have positive representations of the diversity of bodies. And I’ll expect to see that about a week after I see it on the cover of the magazines at the checkout stand. Please note- I am not at all apologizing for the general homogeneity of bodies in porn. I’m simply pointing out that the porn industry is influenced by society’s general trend of unrealistic body expectations.

Of course, porn influences that trend too. I don’t have an answer for this one and I don’t think anyone else does. However, I will point out that there’s some porn that shows (for example) larger women. In some ways, there’s actually more body diversity in porn than at the checkout stand. I still think it sucks that the porn industry is almost entirely clueless when it comes to body image, and all of the other ways that people are shamed for their bodies. But if enough people are willing to spend their cash on people of size, there’s someone willing to make a porn movie with them. It’s a minuscule thing, but it’s worth noting. (Click on the image to see a few movies that feature larger women.)

It Comes Down to Money

Porn is one of the few industries that’s totally unregulated. Other than the requirements around keeping minors out of it and away from it, the primary (and generally only) influence on the producers of porn is customer demand. Makers who try something new or innovative decide whether they can continue creating it based on whether people buy it. Even though the internet and improving technology have made it possible for more people to try making porn, it still costs a fair amount of money to produce and unless there’s an immediate payoff, few people can keep going

There are a few people who are trying to make something different. Tony Comstock is making some really great movies, as are the folks at Erocktavision and Pink’n’White. If you like what they’re making, tell your friends. Help support them and they’ll be able to keep doing it.

Porn Has Lots of Other Problems

I’m not apologizing for porn. I think that there are a lot of ways that the industry and the products it produces are problematic. And I also think that one step towards addressing them is to get some clarity around what’s going on.

And rarely fair. Doesn’t it seem ironic that ‘anti-pornographers’ are making money by selling Price of Pleasure? This DVD, priced at $250 for college and university viewings, is a one-sided view of pornography comprised of re-edited versions of the very clips they claim to warn against. Only I wonder if these anti-pornographers are required to keep records of the 2257 information, let alone if they’ve paid the performers (mostly women) who appear in the videos out of context. Clips include Joanna Angel and companies like Vivid and Kink.com. I hope these filmmakers and lucky students (no one under 18) are happy with the money made from the price of others’ pleasure. Tsk tsk tsk.

Porn and Prostitution Related Books:

• Real Live Nude
• Smart Girl’s Guide to Porn
• America’s War on Sex
• Working Sex
• Best Sex Writing

Radical and Healthy DVDs (these are off the top of my head; ANY title should go on this list because YOU want to watch it):

• Marie and Jack: A Hardcore Love Story
  
• Annie Sprinkle’s Herstory of Porn
  
• Afrodite Superstar
• Bend Over Boyfriend
• Trans Entities: The Nasty Love of Papi and Wil
• Defend Our Porn

Other Pornographic links in the news recently:

• ‘Craigslist Crackdown‘
• A Feminist Defense of Pornography
• Hey New Feminist Antiporn Organizations…

Let me go back to the beginning. The University of California at Northridge is home to the Center for Sex Research, an academic department that, among its many other activities, has hosted interesting interdisciplinary sexuality conferences. Several years ago it held one on transgender issues; in early 1997 it sponsored ICOP, the International Conference on Prostitution. The International Conference on Pornography is its latest project. (Actually, calling these conferences international is pretty misleading; international representation is the conferences’ weakest spot, and there were not many people attending from outside the US and Canada.)

What the Northridge conferences have in common, and what distinguishes them from many other sexuality-related conferences, is the mix of participants. They are academic conferences, no question about that, with plenty of researchers, professors, and other professionals delivering papers and lectures. But there is always a much larger group of, pardon the lingo, laypeople at these events than you would find at, say, The Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality or another such conference. The CSR folks actively recruit participation by the people the conference is “studying,” so there were many people affiliated with the porn world in attendance. Adding an extra dimension to the discussion, a number of first amendment attorneys also attended.

I noticed no obvious anti-porn participation, unless you count the presence of Larry Flynt’s daughter outside with a picket sign. These days, this is typical. Anti-porn activists (including the academic ones) now usually refuse to appear on the same podium as pro-porn or “porn-comfortable” speakers, especially those with ties to the sex-positive feminist movement. The absence of participants who are actively disapproving of porn let the discussions unfold in a much less defensive way, and interestingly, I think we heard more criticism of porn from inside the industry than we would have if anti-porn folks had been present.

Industry participation was broad — several of our favorite “Golden Age” stars were there, including Annie Sprinkle, Candida Royalle, Veronica Hart, Sharon Mitchell, Richard Pacheco, Gloria Leonard, and Vanessa Del Rio. I even glimpsed Georgina Spelvin at a party, though as far as I know she didn’t appear on any conference panels. Ron Jeremy, “the most recognized man in America,” introduced himself to me after one of my panels. Shaking hands with the Hedgehog! (I’ll tell you, it’s surreal meeting a person whose penis you’ve frequently seen on film.) Many of our current industry friends were present too. Nina Hartley, of course, is the kind of “big sister” to many current stars that the Golden Age stars were to her. Juli Ashton, whom you may know from Playboy TV as well as from her video work, was there, as were Shayla Laveaux, Kristi Lake, Luc Wylder, Gino Colbert (the talented gay director), Ed Powers, and many others. Producers and higher-ups were mostly, it seemed to me, conspicuous by their absence, though there was a fairly substantial presence of small-to-medium entrepreneurs whose business medium is the Web.

Several adult products businesses were represented, too, including Good Vibrations — I spoke for us on a panel called “The Scope of Mail Order Erotica,” talking shop with people from Homegrown Video, Adam and Eve, the Stockroom, and others. Just before the conference we heard that Alabama had outlawed sex toys — though, as the ACLU representatives present assured us, that law is already being challenged. Still, even though we were surrounded by friends and interested academics, the chilly climate out in the world was never far from our minds. It was my impression that the degree of legitimacy bestowed by the conference on those whose work is denigrated and even legally threatened meant a great deal to the adult industry participants — especially the performers. They may not get called into court as frequently as distributors, but their sexuality is really in the public domain, subject to comment and criticism from all sides.

For me the high point of the conference was the opening night’s performance, “Pornocopia,” hosted and curated by Annie Sprinkle and Candida Royalle, longtime friends who have supported one another as they grew beyond the confines of the traditional adult industry. Other performers included Candye Kane (my favorite blues singer, a big juicy bisexual ex-porno babe), Henry Mach, a gay man who spent several years in the ’70s writing hetero porn books (now you know why the sex in those things doesn’t sound quite realistic!), transgendered porn sensation Geoffrey Karen Dior, Veronica Vera, Richard Pacheco — and me, with an excerpt from my solo performance “Peep Show.” It was an absolute thrill to share the stage with so many of my heroes and inspirations.

If you want to know more about what went on at PornoCon, check the winter issue of Libido magazine, where I’ll be writing a longer report. And in November of this year I’ll present a new clips show, “Beyond Boogie Nights: The Golden Age of the Blue Movie,” featuring a panel of some of our favorite stars, so locals can stay tuned for more about that. In the meantime, a careful scan of our catalogs will reveal videos and books by many of the above-named artists, so if you’re interested in a crash course on intelligent porn and the sex-positive thinkers whose roots are in the adult industry, you’ve come to the right place.