It’s possible that I’m getting conservative in my old age, but these days I find myself attracted to women and men who are in my peer age group or older. I mean, it’s true that I’m also something of a chubby chaser but I like the fuller shapes that come with age, and while I’m not lusty over granny porn (yet?), I appreciate the mature look. Maybe I was naive when I was younger, but despite knowing that sexuality is fluid and can change over time blah blah blah, I didn’t necessarily think about how age factors into that equation.

Though I’m well aware of the dangers of extending my personal tastes into the realm of thinking how others should conduct their business, I’ve become ever more acutely aware of the fact that most people who watch porn probably aren’t in the same peer age group as the performers. This is, incidentally, not dissimilar from the fact that most people who watch television shows like Gossip Girl aren’t in that peer group either – so its not exactly a revelation.

But still, I think about who I was at 18 and at 21, and I do sometimes feel weird about those young women making the porno. Its purely subjective, but I definitely didn’t know jack shit about sexuality when I was that age: I hadn’t yet perfected the Art of No, nor had I gained knowledge of my limits. Adults of all ages are both capable and incapable of making good choices for themselves, so it’s tough to actually enforce the Ready For Porn Age. The government says its 18. This is something that comes up from time to time within the porn industry, and I know of some directors and companies who have informal or sometimes formal policies about the age of their performers. Oren Cohen at TightFit Productions stepped up a few years ago and publicly stated that he wouldn’t work with women under 21 because he didn’t think they would be fully ready for the intense, SM-inspired shoots he does.

But although the debate about porn and age will undoubtedly rage on, and while Barely Legal as a brand and a wank-inspiring concept continues to be a huge share of the porno market, it wasn’t always like this. Not by a long shot. The sadly defunct but still online Eros Zine has a great interview that Joanne Cachapero did with porn legend Seka last December, in which she talks about how the age and attitudes of performers has changed:

I have girls come up to me that are like 19, 20 years old, and they say, ‘I want to be like you when I grow up…’ And I say, ‘Do you have a college education? Do you have a savings account? Do you have a plan?’

‘Well, no…’

Then I’m like, ‘Go back to school.’

They think I’m out of my mind. But I was like 25, 26 years old before I started. I didn’t just step off the bus. I owned seven adult bookstores before I even got into the performing side of the business.

However, I don’t mean to use my opinion and Seka’s opinions to shame young people about their porny decisions nor to shame older people who like getting off while looking at younger bodies. To this end I asked Trixie Fontaine, a mid-thirties indie webwhore who runs a personal porn site called Tasty Trixie, about how her attractions to younger porn performers have changed over the years, and her answer completely contradicts my feeling on the subject. For Trixie, the attraction to younger models have gotten stronger as she’s gotten older. She had this to say:

I’m not sure if it’s my age and distance from my own youth or being a pornographer whose job it is to see things from the perspective of dirty old men (or just naturally being a dirty old wo-man myself OR it just being natural in GENERAL to think ripe, young women are hot, beautiful to look at, and slightly taboo to jack to). The older I get, the guiltier I feel about it . . . and the hotter it all is. While I’m critical of the way women, especially young women, are portrayed in porn, it doesn’t quash my arousal upon seeing a big cock stuffed in a small-breasted, wide-eyed teen’s mouth.

There’s no one perfect and healthy way to think about it – I mean, its sex and sex is messy and complicated – but the category “adult” really kind of white washes the whole issue. Though clearly the Cult of the Hot Young Thang is strong and influential in the porn biz today, porn certainly allows for more body and age diversity than mainstream media. Even if that diversity gets quickly turned into a fetish, its still worth something.

I’m more or less anti-porn, but wanted to research women-made porn to see the other side of the debate. It interests me that all your blog posts and photos seem to be about and feature naked women and not men. Why is that? Why no sexualization and objectification of men? I just can’t see how perpetuating the women splayed out for male consumption model of porn is very feminist or challenges the dominant discourse of mainstream pornography.

When I was doing media studies and art history in college, there was much to-do about the male gaze – a masculinized way of looking at, visually dissecting, and owning women’s bodies. To some extent, we all participate in this – both men’s and women’s mainstream magazines nourish it for sure. But I think there’s also something potentially empowering in being a woman (whatever her sexual orientation is) actively looking at and engaging with other women’s bodies. I know that I didn’t really look at women’s bodies until I started working in the sex industry. I had, and to some extent still have, expectations about the prettiness and perfection of other women’s bodies – I was in awe of women who were hot enough to make money by being pretty (and cunning). But the closer I got to them, the more I saw not just their imperfections, but also their varying self-doubt and self-pride. And I became one of them – both beautiful and flawed. You can’t really know what women look like if you don’t really look at them. And in that respect there’s nothing wrong or debilitating/objectifying about looking.

But with that argument made, it’s also important to think about why it is that the sexiness of men is so often out of the picture. I’m entirely at fault for this in my own work – sure, it’s my subconscious, it’s the easy availability of pictures of pretty naked ladies, it’s the circles I travel in. There are a million excuses. But the fact remains that given the chance to write about, re-post, or link to images of hot men, I veer towards images of women instead. I’m bisexual, and perhaps visually pulled towards women more than men, but I certainly enjoy ogling and objectifying my male partner in the flesh. So why don’t I seek out images of sexy men?

Obviously there is a thriving gay male porn industry in the world, and many women enjoy watching gay porn. It’s readily available, and the dudes are hot. Of the women I know who enthusiastically watch gay porn, many say that part of their motivation is that gay porn circumvents the whole conversation about female empowerment in porn. If there are no women, you don’t have to worry about whether the female performer really wants that come on her face or if the director is demanding that she take it in the kisser. And there’s definitely something about gay porn that feels like indulging in forbidden fruit. It’s not made with ladies in mind, which is why its fun to peek in on that world. And masturbate to it.

Reading between the lines of the comment from my reader, she seems to be implying that the scale of objectification would be balanced a little better if feminist porn makers put more effort into objectifying men. In many ways this is true, but there are a whole different set of issues when it comes to the gentleman. Many female directors who cast men in their films have had luck with casting better looking men; it turns out that women like hot men much more than they like ugly ones (hence the gay porn). But extremely good looking, well muscled men often read as gay. This is a weird thing about our culture – there’s that deep seated assumption that women don’t really like to look at guys, and if a guy presents himself to be ogled, he must be performing for other gay men. Sometimes this is true (hello, Playgirl!), but a big part of the problem is that the heterosexual female gaze is negated and all looking at men is coded as somehow gay. Convoluted for sure.

I don’t necessarily think there’s a different, not-gay way to look at men and photograph them to make them look less gay or more appealing to women. I think it’s in the ways we’re looking, and weird cultural distortion glasses we all seem to wear when looking at male hotness. The challenge is not to find a not-gay way of looking, but to stop believing there are so many different ways to see. And my personal challenge is to spend more time looking for and writing about sexy images of men.

But these days, the Madonna/Whore complex has gotten ever more tangled and bizzarro. Many women strive to reach some balance between the two – while many others say a big fat fuck you and try to color outside of those limited and dichotomous lines. Though being sexually empowered is held in high esteem, the actual manifestations of sexual empowerment for women are frequently met with disapproval.

This past week my heart was heavy thinking about Deborah Jean Palfrey, the notorious “DC Madam,” who was found dead by her own hand on her mother’s property in Florida. When I heard the news, I put my hand on my heart – a melodramatic gesture when put into words, but I was definitely heartbroken. Last year Palfrey was thrust into the spotlight as the madam of Pamela Martin and Associates, a Washington, DC based escort agency that serviced men in the upper echelons of society. Quite a media circus erupted when the names of some of her clients were revealed to the public. One such man, Randall Tobias, stepped down from his position in government; another, a US Senator from Louisiana named David Vitter, remains at his job; hundreds to thousands of other men sweat bullets when her client lists were made publicly available. Two weeks after being found guilty of money laundering, using the mail for illegal purposes, and racketeering, Palfrey killed herself.

Though I don’t like to use this word over-zealously to apply to the experiences of sex workers, I do believe that Palfrey was victimized because of her choice of profession – she profited from her and other women’s sexualities, and that was her downfall. But the thing was, she wasn’t exploited by the work itself, but rather by the US justice system and the ever vicious mainstream media. Though this is in many ways an extreme example of what happens to women on the “whore” side of the backslash, it’s also revealing. The men she dealt with walked away relatively unscathed but Palfrey herself paid the ultimate price. Despite having fought back loudly and defiantly, she seems to have felt that she was out of options. Our society’s twisted sexual mores certainly played a major role in Palfrey’s demise.

There are also other ways to be slutty – take the example of Kerry Cohen. Though she’s now written two books, I just discovered Kerry Cohen this week via Jezebel, where the degree of her sluttiness is questioned. Both of Cohen’s books are memoirs titled Easy and Loose Girl - they are tales of sluttiness and salvation, though as the bloggers at Jezebel note the sluttiness isn’t particularly extreme. The salvation is one of self esteem, not religious conversion. Cohen’s work confronts the shame of sluttiness and it’s motivating forces – and the internet shit-slinging that has resulted has ranged from amusing to hateful. For the ladies at Jezebel, Cohen’s sluttiness is unremarkable, not worthy of a book contract. But for the editors at women’s magazine Marie Claire, where Cohen was also featured, Cohen is a “sex addict” – a term with which Cohen does not identify.

 For Palfrey, Cohen, and many other women who live more private lives, slut shaming is a powerful weapon of the media, and it has outstepped the bounds of enforcing societal norms and morals. Though women who live by their sexual wits are often thoroughly punished through a variety of channels, women like Kerry Cohen are also punished for a strange mix of being too madonna-like and too whore-like. Though I don’t like to end on a totally down note, it seems increasingly impossible to escape from the madonna/whore complex and slut shaming if you are a woman who speaks out about sexuality, no matter what the message. Though it’s a frustrating battle, I have some hope that if women keep stepping forward and speaking out, their actual messages will start getting through. Media spin (often the cringe-worthy kind) is inevitable, but silence is an entirely avoidable affliction.

The internet is for geeks with bad acne and missing limbs. Internet dating is a last ditch effort and can attract stalkers. People who do cybersex don’t have healthy sex lives. The sex industry is using the internet to exploit women.These are all mildly to majorly ridiculous stereotypes of people who use the internet, stereotypes that will shatter this coming weekend in Atlanta. The first Sex 2.0 conference, primarily organized by blogger and podcaster Amber Rhea, is being held at BDSM community space 1763 in Atlanta on April 12th, and people from all over the United States will be there. The thing they all have in common is their interest in the conference’s subtitle: the intersection of social media, feminism, and sexuality. Hopefully most of them are also interested in hearing me talk, since I’m the keynote speaker and will be delivering a short (but fierce!) talk promptly at 9:15 am.

I talked (by email, of course!) with a few different people who are planning to attend the conference to find out what kind of company I’ll be in. It turns out that the participants are a pretty eclectic group who will be coming from near and far to meet up, share ideas, educate each other and have a little fun. Here are a few profiles of some people who will be in attendance.

Tom Query is a 50-year-old sex therapist and semi-professional photographer who has lived in Atlanta since 1990. He self-identifies as a feminist, so he isn’t frightened off from attending the conference by this part of the con’s subtitle. In fact, he sees this as a potential point of growth. He told me that he feels that oppressed groups “need supporters/empathetic beings/men who are trying to get ‘it’,” so he hopes to listen up and gain more insight on a variety of topics. He also hopes to meet potential photographic muses.

Twanna A. Hines is a 33-year old writer, editor, blogger and sexpot who is based in New York. She’s got two different versions of her blog Funky Brown Chick: one on her own domain FunkyBrownChick.com, and one that’s part of the Blog-a-Log on Nerve. Though she blogs about sexuality, Twanna doesn’t deliver a blow-by-blow (heh) account of her own sex life – but she spares no details about her constant string of dates. She distinguishes between sex and dating blogs, saying that “Sex blogs often have information about activities, items and events related to sexual intercourse. Dating blogs often chronicle journeys toward finding relationships — whether casual, committed, polyamorous, intimate, sexual or some combination thereof.” Her session at Sex 2.0 is called A History of Sex, and it comes with this guarantee: “Dry, stuffy talk not allowed. Remember? It’s sex. It’s supposed to be fun.”

Mistress Maeve hails from Vermont, where by day she is a professional in the sales and marketing field and by night writes a sex advice column and blogs a guide to love and lust for the alt weekly Seven Days. Maeve is one of the many folks experimenting with sex online who has to maintain something of a double life, so she’s looking forward to Sex 2.0, where she can be her naughty self in (semi) public. She says, “Being ‘out’ in Atlanta is going to feel like a huge release – like a shoulder-biting, back-scratching orgasm, if you will. I can’t wait to shed my layers of anonymity and let the Mistress Maeve side of myself be the first one people see.”

Renegade Evolution, a thirty-something DC-area blogger, stripper, and porn performer who recently bought partial ownership in a stripping agency, often feels that as a sex worker, she’s regarded with suspicion by feminists and people who do sex purely recreationally. Over the two plus years she’s been blogging, her blog has become a mouthpiece for her criticisms of people who make wrongful assumptions about sex workers. She says that, “…having a blog out there and reading the blogs of others has been a priceless source for potential alliances, the sharing of information, and the gathering of contacts, resources, events, and issues.” The two sessions she’s leading at Sex 2.0, “Sexwork, heels, porn & online feminism” and “Yes, but do you swing?” encapsulate some of her passions.

The full roster of sessions, bios of the presenters, as well as registration info for Sex 2.0 can be found on http://sex20con.com

Audacia Ray
LiveGirlReview.com
WakingVixen.com

Check out her directorial debut, The Bi Apple!

I was not a porn consumer or seeker when I was a teenager. Though I was sexually precocious and promiscuous in many ways, porn wasn’t really on my radar. In fact, when a high school friend found me on MySpace recently and discovered that I’d become a porn director, he was pretty surprised. But since I’m a bit of an extremist, when I began to explore porn, I really did it up. And I wanted to find porn that was like me – bisexual.At my first job in sex, I lucked into a treasure trove of porn with obsessively categorized videos, magazines, and mementos: the Ralph Wittington Collection at the Museum of Sex. I started as a researcher at the Museum and then became an assistant curator the year it opened – and in addition to jump-starting my career as a sex nerd, being exposed (ahem) to the wealth of smut in the Wittington collection plus meeting a delightful array of sex industry legends got me started on my own personal journey.

Among the carefully labeled boxes that contained videos in plastic archival boxes, polaroids of enthusiastic collector Ralph Wittington with a variety of stars, and a smattering of creepy flesh-colored sex toys was a box labeled “bisexual.” The contents were a bunch of Paul Norman films – the “Bi and Beyond” series that kicked off in 1988. The late 1980s through the mid-1990s were apparently the heyday for bisexual porn – if a heyday can be considered somewhat prolific production from one director.

I was a bit puzzled – this bisexual porn seemed to be kind of a crappy afterthought (even in it’s heyday). The main thing that distinguishes bi porn –then and today- from straight porn is the fact that men touch each other in it; porn with girl on girl action is essentially considered straight. And no one bats an eye if a female performer who does scenes with other women says she’s straight; but guys who do scenes with other guys are thought of as gay gay gay, whatever they call themselves.

In addition to the dude-on-dude action, the Paul Norman films often had “hermaphrodites” in them. In one of the films I saw, the so-called hermaphrodites were biological women wearing flesh-colored strap-ons with lots of concealer makeup so they kinda sorta looked like real penises. If you’re feeling generous, you might be inclined to think of these hermaphrodites as Havelock Ellis’ definition of bisexual – people with the genitals of both sexes. Or you might think that Norman either didn’t know MTF pre-op transsexuals exist or for some reason didn’t want to hire them. I don’t really know the answer to that quandary.

In Norman’s films, the performers generally give the impression that they are doing a job, and not one they entirely understand or think is sexy. To his credit, Norman’s films were a thing unto their own – bisexual porn. Since then, however, bisexual smut has been subsumed into gay porn, despite the presence of heterosexual and girl-girl (I hesitate to say lesbian) scenes. The porn industry seems to not at all believe that bisexuality exists, rather that for guys its a stumbling block on the way to full fledged gay, and that girls just want to get attention (and paying porn jobs) any way possible.

In porn, girls do each other with a male viewer in mind, and once a guy has done another guy rumors will fly about his sexuality for the rest of his career – often he uses a different name for gay and straight scenes. Many porn studios with contract girls don’t allow their girls to do scenes in bi movies or with men who’ve done gay scenes because of the associated stigma and the perceived risk of HIV infection. Sex educators and sex toy retailers know better and acknowledge a broader spectrum of sexuality, which is probably why one of the few bi movies of note in recent years, Slide Bi Me, was produced by the San Francisco-based Good Vibrations in 2001.

In 2006, when I got the opportunity to direct and produce my first porn film, I knew immediately that I wanted to make a film that did justice to actual bisexual experiences and identities (and I emphasize that both of those are plural). I aimed to make a film that captured some of the bi action I’d personally seen and participated in at private sex parties in my hometown New York City. I had a wild ride with The Bi Apple, which was released by Adam and Eve Pictures in February 2007. It all started with a big party in a strip club, which was followed by public screenings in Amsterdam, New York and Berlin (as well as plenty of -ahem- private screenings), an award for Hottest Bi Sex Scene at the Good For Her Feminist Porn Awards, a blurb in Oprah magazine, and a nomination for the GayVN Award for Best Bisexual Release. A lot of things about The Bi Apple don’t fit too well with the bi traditions – it has a female protagonist and a female director, and it features authentically bisexual performers, many of whom were amateurs.

A few people asked me if I felt weird about being given a nod by GayVN but being totally ignored by the AVN Awards, where niche award categories like “Best Internal Release” exist but bi porn is invisible. Honestly – no. I don’t really feel at home in either half of the porn industry – the halves are the problem for me. Sexuality isn’t black or white, there’s a lot of gray area – just have a look at the Kinsey scale and you’ll see that there are very few people who are perfectly gay or perfectly straight. When I first began to wade through the wealth of sexual media six years ago, I wouldn’t have believed that the sex industry could be so, well, conservative and narrow-minded about sexuality. But my experiences with seeking out and making bisexual smut have taught me that indeed, that is the case. Of course some of it is marketing – which I have great respect for. You can’t sell a product if you don’t have a specific name for it, and claiming to make anything goes pansexual porn would be met with silent dismissal from most distributors. But the way that most pornographers steer clear of bisexual activity is about more than marketing – it’s about homo- and biphobia, being afraid of fluidity, and maintaining an outdated, one-drop rule about gayness. In an industry where anal gaping, throat fucking, and group sex are part of normal, mainstream movies, it will always seem bizarre to me that bisexual interaction is the ick factor.

Audacia Ray
LiveGirlReview.com
WakingVixen.com

Ian Denchasy, however, has a much harder time avoiding the turns of phrase that make him feel icky – because they describe the industry he works in. Along with his wife Alicia, Ian founded and runs Freddy and Eddy, an erotic boutique in the Venice Beach neighborhood of Los Angeles that began ten years ago as a website ploy to get free sex toys to review.

Today the business has blossomed into one of the most unique sex shops I’ve ever been into – Ian prepares cappuccino almost as soon as visitors arrive, while Alicia gives a personalized tour of their space. First timers can expect to spend an hour or more perusing, chatting and learning, and though they might leave with a new product, they’re just as likely to borrow a book or movie from the lending library the couple maintains.

And those icky words that make Ian shudder? “Porn,” “adult,” and “novelty.” During a gathering at the Adult Entertainment Expo last month, I had an impassioned conversation with Ian about those words, and the fact that they make him feel gross about his sexuality and his desire to seek out erotic entertainment that will respect him in the morning. Although over the last twenty years we’ve seen the rapid growth of the women’s and couple’s markets (hence sites like this one), words like these persist, and they don’t do us any favors.

After one too many years of being put through the paces of adult conventions and feeling assaulted by ickiness, Ian and Alicia took the initiative to pioneer a new kind of sexuality event, Love LA.

The one day event took place on Sunday, January 27th in rainy Los Angeles largely due to the passion of Ian and Alicia and the sponsorship of the LA Weekly and Xbiz. Although from a distance it looked like a typical adult trade show, the organizers made sure it was anything but. For one thing, they decided early on that there would be no porn. That’s right: no 18-year-old girls in lucite heels, no balloon-breasted women signing 8×10s for a long line of admirers. No porn.

Where the porn would be in other shows like it, Love LA had welcoming booths in which independent sex toy companies had their wares on display and did a lot of meeting and greeting. They also offered up seminars throughout the day that ranged from bondage basics to tips on role play to lighthearted crafty fun like making explicit shrinky dinks. The whole event was billed as “the first ever Sexual Health, Education and Entertainment Exhibition,” and it seems to have lived up to the hype.

Olivia Hayes, who commandeers the Pleasure Happens blog for sex toy retailer the Pleasure Chest, was impressed with the swankiness of the event. “I think there was a strong commitment made to distance this event from the ‘trashiness’ people generally associate with sex toys and the like,” she says, “and I think [calling the event] ‘upscale’ would be about on par.” The event was full of retailers, with female owned and run companies having a major presence, and small, independent businesses overrunning the floor.

The mainstream adult industry is unfortunately characterized by faceless corporations or male leadership that would make anyone want to hide behind the anonymity of the typical adult transaction, but the small companies represented at Love LA take a different approach entirely.

Olivia reports that, “I felt like this event was really more about networking, brand awareness, and education… I wouldn’t say there were a ton of actual products sold. A lot of swag was given away and much networking was done, and I think that was more the point than to sell stuff, which I feel is more often the motivation behind other trade shows.”

The absence of porn seems to have affected the demographic of the attendees – Ian says that of the 1000 people who bought tickets, about 65% were female, and about half of those brought their partners with them. Olivia confirms this and says that, “There were lots of young couples, queer female couples (of all gender expressions…not just the lipstick lesbians that LA is known for), older couples that seemed a little shy, single people milling about…The only demographic I didn’t really get the sense that this event attracted were gay men.”

The questions Love LA asked were: can so-called “adult” businesses attract attention and enthusiasm if porn stars are cut out of the picture? Will consumers still know what they’re looking at without those words that make Ian go “ew”?

Overwhelmingly, the event answered both of these questions with a big yes. People who want to get sexy aren’t stupid, they don’t need to be talked down to or always have their basest desires appealed to.

But for this avowed pornographer and shameless smut watcher, eliminating the porn isn’t the best and only answer. Certainly it made planning easier, but hopefully with a little education and the positive example of the non-porn part of the biz, pornographers with their heads and hearts in the right place will be welcome in the future. The foundation is laid, and the potential is proven – it is possible to make sexy entertainment fun and welcoming without losing the mojo.

Click here to check out pictures from Love LA!

Audacia Ray
LiveGirlReview.com
WakingVixen.com

Check out her directorial debut, The Bi Apple!

All photo credits: Metis Black, founder of Tantus.

The idea of pornographers with ethics and strong political convictions seems ridiculous to many people. After all, isn’t porn just about overly-tanned hedonism, driven by the desire to make a mint while surrounded by swarms of hot chicks who wouldn’t otherwise give you (assuming the portly, fiftyish male “you”) the time of day? Not so fast, assumption-maker.”I think a lot of folks are surprised that what I produce even exists,” says FurryGirl, “especially lefty/liberal sorts of people who have a condescending attitude towards the sex industry and people who work within it.”

Furry Girl, so named for her commitment to her body hair, has been in the adult industry for five years. She quickly became a photographer and webmistress after she started modeling – and did the math. She cut out the content creator and manager middlemen and took control of production and marketing herself, and has reaped the benefits ever since. In addition to her eponymous site, Furry Girl runs a porn site featuring vegan and vegetarian models, VegPorn; a menstruation porn site, EroticRed; and the Sensual Vegan, an all-vegan sexuality products online shop. Beyond the fact that Furry Girl benefits better financially from cutting out the middleman-her sites are her sole source of income-she can market herself without the trappings of porno protocol. What emerges from her sites is the sense of Furry Girl as friendly, personable, and delightfully naughty, without a hint of the dirty shame that seems to permeate a lot of other sites.

Amateur and independent porn began getting buzz with the advent of the home video camera and the newly glorious ability it bestowed on the average electronics geek to film his or her pasty white ass bobbing up and down in a poorly lit guest bedroom in New Jersey (not to stereotype or anything). But it really took off in the early 2000s as the Internet began to emerge as the go-to place for sex businesses, especially homemade ones. More specifically, young, technologically inclined idealists began to turn to the Internet to create their visions of sex-positive culture online.

When the oft-cited Suicide Girls was launched in 2001, it positioned itself as a site of female-empowerment via Internet nudity. In subsequent years, this turned out to be a bit more complicated and maybe not really the way things were running behind the scenes. Still, there are independent pornographers whose hope for the empowering mojo of independent porn springs eternal. The Sharing is Sexy (SiS) collective is one such group – their freshly hatched and totally free website launched just last week. Unlike Furry Girl, the SiS folks have no intention of making a living from their work on the site. In fact, as collective member lotu5 puts it, “SiS came out of anti-capitalist activism. …all our content is free, we try to spend as little as possible, dumpster what we can, leech resources from universities and jobs and make everything free.” At the same time, lotu5 says that, “One of our primary goals is to not discredit sex workers and ‘for pay’ porn sites.”

Although I do raise my fist in solidarity with queer, feminist, indie pornographers like the SiS collective, it’s difficult for me to wrap my head around the idea of detaching images of people getting sexy from the money-making industry around it. Part of this, no doubt, is the fact that I’ve made my living in and around the adult industry for the past six years. My impulse is not “it’s a dirty business but someone’s got to do it,” but rather that if you’re going to put yourself out there in a very intense, life-altering way, you should be financially rewarded for it as handsomely as possible.

This isn’t to say that porn performers and producers should be doing laps in platinum-lined swimming pools, hungry people of the world be damned. In fact, there are a number of porn businesses that funnel some of their porn money into other sex-positive causes. Furry Girl donates 5% of earnings from her adventures in porn to the independently financed Scarleteen, a sexuality resource for teenagers. Madison Young, an adult performer and owner of the San Francisco art gallery Femina Potens, has also used her porn money to fund her work with the gallery, which shows art by women and transgendered artists. Madison also has a website, Anal4Art, in the works. “Anal4Art will feature hot queer and straight artists getting it up the ass in hot settings like rock venues, artist studios, art class, etc.,” says Young. The earnings from the site will benefit Femina Potens.

But what kind of cultural currency does a free porn site hold? For the visitors the answer is painfully obvious: unmitigated access to free porn (duh). But for producers and performers, things are a little more complex. The collective members of Sharing is Sexy clearly see their disregard for the finances of the porn biz as an act of resistance. “I came to SiS with the remembrance that the realization of my desires has healed my cunt from shame and abuse,” asserts collective member j, “and from this sexual liberation I am ready to share my desires.” For the collective, SiS is about sharing, and constructive exchanges around sexuality. This doesn’t make the site a higher form of porn than that produced by Furry Girl, Madison Young, or the hordes of producers churning out a new DVD every week. Instead, it’s a different form of sexual communicating. If the power of porn is handled well by people who over think (ahem), then maybe the way sites handle their money isn’t the biggest issue of them all, as long as everyone’s free to do as they please with their resources (whether those resources are flesh or cash).

Audacia Ray
LiveGirlReview.com
WakingVixen.com

Check out her directorial debut, The Bi Apple!

Though neither director shies away from the hardcore nature of porn, both of them reject the absurdity of the beauty standards and simplified sexuality presented by mainstream culture and pornos that are typically aimed at a male audience. Lust observes that, “One of the most repeated clichés is the fact that male porn directors like to portay slutty lolas, horny teens, sex maniac nannies, desperate milfs, hot nurses, nymphomaniacs hookers, and gangbang heroines – these women are THEIR ideal sex partners. And the guys in the movies are almost always mafia guys, pimps, dealers, multimillionaires, afroamerican mega sized sex machines – (these are the THEIR sex heroes.” Instead of these overblown, eye-roll inducing stereotypes, Lust prefers to watch normal looking people having sex they enjoy under circumstances that most viewers can identify with. Ostertag concurs and takes this one step further, saying, “There definitely should be more real cool strong hot women in front of the camera that I as an ‘intelligent hot girl’ can identify with.”

Lust and Ostertag both forgo casting agencies to find performers for their movies – it’s a much more involved and personal process than that. Lust searches for talent who are good looking but don’t look like porn stars throughout Spain and also in the Balearic and Canary Islands. Ostertag doesn’t do casting sessions at all, choosing instead to trust her intuition. “I watch people and try to find out if they would also work in front of a camera,” she says, “So I talk to them to find out if the chemistry is right and arrange a test shooting. Berlin is a good place to work that way as there are a lot of people around who are curious and open.”

Although the two directors have a common vision and share a critique of the way most porn is made, the execution of their concepts is very different and very much linked with their personal tastes. Lust directs her films for a female audience and tries to appeal to feminine – and feminist – sensibilities. Her short film “The Good Girl,” which has now become a part of her most recent feature-length movie, “Five Hot Stories for Her” (http://www.cincohistorias.com – only in Spanish at the moment), has a tongue in cheek approach to the typical porn set-up -there’s a hot pizza delivery guy- but a heavy focus on the woman’s fantasy and pleasure. The man in the film is very much a prop, but not in the ugly-man-with- only-his-cock-in-the-frame way that is prevalent in so much mainstream porn. The characters interact with a lot of playfulness, and the film is shot to give the viewer visual pleasure in looking at the sex as well as the filmmaking. Lust asserts that porn made for men and porn made for women are different kinds of products, and says that, “Women have the right to have our own explicit movies.”

Although Julia Ostertag finds sex in film compelling and thinks of her films as visual experiments or research studies about human desire, identity and sexuality, she doesn’t exist entirely within the realm of pornography. She films explicit sex in her movies, and considers herself to be a female director working with the language of eroticism, but calling her work porn is a bit simplistic. And though she is indeed a female director, she doesn’t see this as a compelling reason to focus exclusively on a female audience.

Ostertag’s first experiment with sex and film involved her own body and sexuality as the subject. The 10 minute short, entitled “Sexjunkie,” is very revealing both physically and emotionally – it’s haunting and sexual, and not at all a commercial porn film. The director has also brought her aesthetic to the commercial porn industry in Germany, where she had to curtail her artistic vision a little bit to give the company what it required. She is currently working on a gritty, independently-produced experimental feature-length narrative film tentatively called “Wasteland,” which Ostertag says is, “About a girl in a post-apocalyptic wasteland area who kills her lovers in different ways after having sex with them.” Though she says that the film is experimental rather than pornographic, it certainly toes the line and won’t shy away from explicit depictions of either sex or violence.

Both Julia Ostertag and Erika Lust have spent the last several years honing their craft, but the results have been very different. Each of the women supports female empowerment for women in erotic films, but the aesthetic and the content of those films ranges from Lust’s tender and playful to Ostertag’s rough and intense. But these visions of sex and sexiness aren’t mutually exclusive – they are part of the fabric of new erotic cinema that is being woven in both Europe and the United States.

Learn more about Erika Lust’s work on her website, http://www.erikalust.com

Learn more about Julia Ostertag’s work on her website, http://www.julia-ostertag.de

Audacia Ray
LiveGirlReview.com
WakingVixen.com

Check out her directorial debut, The Bi Apple!