It’s that time of year again — wait, you haven’t heard? It’s been ten years now (ten!) since the first annual Feminist Porn Awards. Okay, hold on. I’ll start again.
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Feminism and pornography haven’t typically been the finest of bedfellows. It’s an industry that’s often very exploitative of women, not only in the way it treats its female (and male) actors, but also in the way it changes viewers’ perception of what a healthy sexual relationship is. If you’ve been on the internet (and since you’re here, I assume you have) then you’ve seen some porn. If you haven’t, I mean this seriously: go watch some. Critically. Look at the kinds of shots used, look at the kind of actors used, look at which body parts you see. (Obvious disclaimer: don’t go look at any porn if it’s illegal for you to do so where you are. This is a blog post, not a call for revolution.)
Anyhow, there are a ton of bad, hyperbolic arguments against porn: you’ll regularly hear people on the internet say pornography wrecks families, encourages violence against women, or is just plain old immoral. (Don’t get me wrong: it can do and it can be. But it doesn’t have to and it doesn’t have to be.) But there are also a lot of good reasons a lot of porn really is bad. Especially in a world in which pornography is the only sex-ed many Americans get (aside from “don’t do it!!!1!!1!” which we all know is totally going to work).
This guy in Denmark even wants to teach kids about porn, though I myself would shy away from advocating showing them porn in class. (You want a way to stop kids having sex? Make them watch porn as a class. Talk about scarring.)
But this is the 21st century, and things are looking up. There’s a growing movement and demand for feminist (or at the very least not misogynist) porn these days. What does that mean? This great post from Everyday Feminism is a good start. The Feminist Porn Awards site has some good resources. The Feminist Porn Book gets more into the topic if you’re interested. Anyway, the TL;DR is that, among other things, feminist porn:
- should treat men and women equally (characters and actors, everybody should be having a good time — protip: if it’s not showing men’s faces, you’re probably watching sexist porn)
- shouldn’t just be one-directional (it shouldn’t be something one party does to the other… except in certain clearly consentual situations)
- shouldn’t be impersonal or dehumanizing (think humans in healthy relationships, not paid-for objects)
- should be at least a little bit like what real sex is like (I know it’s fantasy, but there are limits to what anyone who’s had sex can be expected to believe)
Ideally it’d have representation of all kinds of body types and genders and a more realistic depiction of the human body, but as it’s a fantasy genre (and as we can’t even get Hollywood to go there, let alone silicone valley) maybe we’ll put that on the wish list for later.
So ten years ago, in Toronto (for some reason I feel compelled to follow this with the words “of course”) a sex-positive sex and education shop called Good For Her started the Feminist Porn Awards. The criteria for nomination were simple:
1. Women and/or traditionally marginalized people are involved in the direction, production and/or conception of the work.
2. The work depicts genuine pleasure, agency and desire for all performers, especially women and traditionally marginalized people.
3. The work expands the boundaries of sexual representation on film, challenges stereotypes and presents a vision that sets the content apart from most mainstream pornography. This may include depicting a diversity of desires, types of people, bodies, sexual practices, and/or an anti-racist or anti-oppression framework throughout the production.
It’s like the Bechdel Test for porn.
And this year marks the tenth anniversary. So coming up on April 15-17, they’ll hand out the awards and it’ll be a grand time I’m sure. The website is here (NSFW, obviously), with lists of nominees and details. Hats off to all the nominees for trying to fix porn from the inside, and may the best skin flick win!
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Richard Ford Burley is a doctoral candidate in English at Boston College, where he’s writing about remix culture and the processes that generate texts in the Middle Ages and on the internet. He sometimes has to produce his own #FeministFriday content when Elle’s off studying pop culture, and this is what you get.