Porno feminista: las políticas de producir placer

by Tristan Taormino (Editor), Constance Penley (Editor), Celine Parreñas Shimizu (Editor)

Una apasionada defensa de la pornografía con enfoque feminista.

Un análisis crítico sobre la relación entre trabajo sexual e ideología.
«Esta nueva antología se retira completamente de la pantalla para situarse en la fábrica donde se produce el porno. Intérpretes y productores, junto con académicos, proponen un análisis compartido no sólo sobre lo que significa mirar imágenes de actividad sexual de adultos, sino también lo que significa crearlas.»

The Guardian



«Trabajadoras del sexo, académicas y feministas exploran si la pornografía es intrínsecamente antifeminista en esta colección inteligente, accesible, y relevante … Además de ser extremadamente provocadora, esta ineludible colección resulta accesible para todos y la materia es por derecho propio cautivadora y entretenida.»

Publisher’s Weekly



«Para Taormino y otras feministas involucradas en la creación y el estudio de la pornografía los contenidos sexuales explícitos suponen una oportunidad para abordar de forma crítica la relación entre la identidad y la agencia. Mediante la subversión y diversificación de las a menudo estereotipadas representaciones de la sexualidad que encontramos en los medios tradicionales, las pornógrafas feministas invitan a las audiencias tradicionalmente marginadas a conectar con el sexo como un medio para el placer y el poder.»

Manifesta Mag

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, Sexuality, Queer, Gender, Sex Work, Essays

544 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Tristan Taormino is an award-winning writer, sex educator, speaker, filmmaker, and radio host. She is the editor of 25 anthologies and author of seven books, including her latest, The Feminist Porn Book, 50 Shades of Kink: An Introduction to BDSM, The Secrets of Great G-Spot Orgasms and Female Ejaculation, The Ultimate Guide to Kink: BDSM, Role Play and the Erotic Edge and Take Me There: Trans and Genderqueer Erotica, winner of a 2012 Lambda Literary Award. As the head of Smart Ass Productions, she has directed and produced twenty-four adult films. She is the producer and host of Sex Out Loud, a weekly radio show on the VoiceAmerica Network.

Reviews

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

No doubt that porn shapes our culture and that our culture shapes porn, so I appreciate The Feminist Porn Book for addressing pornography in deep, meaningful ways. The editors include a multitude of voices, including sex workers who have starred in porn, porn producers, porn academics, as well as people from different racial/ethnic groups, cis and trans voices, able and disabled individuals, queer perspectives, etc. I most enjoyed reading the essays in which those within the industry critiqued the problematic parts of it, such as women who called out the facial “money shot” for its objectification, women of color who named their exotification and fetishization within the industry, and trans and disabled writers who reclaimed their own attractiveness through their sex work. While porn is often rightfully associated with misogyny and sexism, this collection highlights those working within the industry trying to improve it.

That said, as fellow Goodreads reviewer Melissa writes in her review, I found the lack of critique of capitalism and labor exploitation a bit unsettling. I’m not critiquing the sex workers for their choices, I just wish the editors had included some writing about how to better support sex workers in the industry from an economic justice perspective, especially those who come from marginalized backgrounds. A few essays touch on this point, about porn being driven by consumers and how no matter what at the end of the day a product is being sold, yet I felt underwhelmed by the depth of the economic analysis. Perhaps I feel this way about this book because I recently read the amazing Revolting Prostitutes , which included a thorough naming and deconstruction of capitalism.

Overall, a good book that I would recommend to those interested in sexuality, sexual expression, media studies, feminism, or just like, porn. My favorite essay Keiko Lane’s “Imag(in)ing Possibilities: The Psychotherapeutic Potential of Queer Pornography,” a powerful work about a therapist recognizing her own complicity in pathologizing queer desire and how she has striven to do better. While some of the essays have a bit too much jargon, the overall intent of the collection – to create a compilation of feminist essays on pornography to work toward dismantling the complete fixation on white, heterosexual men’s pleasure – rings clear.

[Melissa · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book had some great essays about how to make feminist porn (although if visual representations of sex are feminist, I much rather call it "erotica" than porn), but a majority of the essays put a bad taste in my mouth primarily because they never once questioned capitalism, exploitative labor, and the connections of the control of women's bodies to capitalism and instead very explicitly celebrated it. You're not making good feminist porn if your tantamount goal is capital and not the explosion of patriarchal, heterosexist, cissexist, ableist, sizest, and white supremacist control of the "gaze." No way, no how (the revolution will be not be funded, thank you very much). There was rarely an acknowledgement that feminists can watch and engage with porn and support sex workers (their autonomy, their sexualities, their health, their skilled labor) while still hating what capitalism does to exploit people's labor. There definitely needed to be a book which explored feminist porn, but there was this underlying attitude in many of the essays that shamed you for being a feminist who aims for the destruction of capitalism.

[Kara Babcock · Rating 4 out of 5]

“My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit.”

This powerful statement, first deployed and used in this essay by Flavia Dzodan, is often on my mind. And I choose to open my review of The Feminist Porn Book with it, because that is how I want to position myself. As a white person, I recognize I have a hell of a lot of privilege in our society. So it is imperative that I remember the importance of intersectionality, and that I work hard not to let my feminist thoughts and statements inadvertently support other systems of oppression.

I choose to open my review of The Feminist Porn Book with this statement, because sex work is a nexus of intersectionality. Sex work requires us to interact with sexism and misogyny, with transphobia and homopobia, with racism and abelism, and with capitalist exploitation. We must engage with all of these issues; we must be intersectional when discussing sex work. So it can’t even be as simple as being “pro” sex work or “anti” sex work or pornography. The issue is far more nuanced than that, and that’s why I picked up this book.

If you want a one-sentence summary: The Feminist Porn Book is a collection of scholarly and personal essays about feminism and porn from people who study, produce, direct, or perform in pornography. Many of the essays are highly academic, both in tone and language and in the sense that they are rigorously cited with endnotes. Many of the essays come from people who have spent most of their adult lives behind of or in front of the camera, directly engaging with pornography and with their own complex feelings about the medium and how it relates with feminist movements. Although certain common themes run throughout some of the essays, and the editors have grouped them largely into four broad topics, each essay is its own revelation given the author’s unique experiences, perspective, and opinions.

This is a diverse book, for the most part. There are cis and trans voices, abled and disabled voices, Black and brown and white voices, straight and queer voices, etc. There are certainly some voices missing from the conversation—in their introduction, the authors admit that this volume focuses on the porn industry of the West: “…for feminist porn to be a global project, more work would need to be done to include non-Western scholars and pornographers in the conversation”. Yet I think it is a good sign of the diversity of this collection that not all of the essays line up behind a single ideology of feminist porn. Or, as the introduction states: “Throughout the book, we explore the multiple definitions of feminist porn, but we refuse to fix its boundaries.” Certainly there are aspects of some essays I didn’t agree with or would critique, others that are oppositional to each other but that I don’t yet have an opinion on, one way or the other. That’s awesome. This is a book that makes you think and question.

The first part of the book provides a bit of history into the emergence of feminist porn. The first essay is an excerpt from Betty Dodson’s memoir. This is one piece that I found both fascinating and occasionally frustrating, for Dodson throws off little nuggets like, “Most men are hardwired to have multiple sex partners…” that set my skeptical-of-evolutionary-psychology-and-gender-essentialism alarm bells ringing. By and large, however, this part of the book is very eye-opening for a younger reader like myself. As someone who came of age online, it’s hard to understand what it would have been like to live in a world that did not have constant, immediate access to porn. I mean, these days it is hard to avoid even with your safe search filter on. I know, in theory, that there existed a time of the porno videotape and the hard copy porno mag, etc.—but I don’t know what that world is like, or what it was like for those people producing porn and trying to make it feminist.

The second part of the book concerns the feedback cycle between watching porn and producing feminist porn. This section truly embraces intersectionality. They approach the question of feminist porn from the perspectives of race, queer identity, therapy, and more. The essays herein really challenge the reader to consider porn beyond the thin veneer of primarily heterosexual, heavily racist, commodified pornography that we often find at the surface of the industry.

One of my main takeaways of this book is that I really still have so much more to learn about this subject. I feel like I might have felt back when I first started learning about sexism, misogyny, patriarchy, etc. I’m still learning the vocabulary and trying to listen to all the various voices of those directly involved and marginalized by these issues. Most crucially, I’m aware that I need to be careful of generalizing about porn. For example, just before I started reading this book, I was having a conversation with a friend about porn (because, yeah, I have awesome friends who will talk to me about porn). I said, among other things, that it’s unfortunate people often get their sex education from porn these days. In some sense, I still agree with that sentiment—the extremely problematic porn I mentioned above, which is so easily available and prevalent, creates so many problems if internalized as a representation of what sex really is. Yet in making that statement, I simultaneously erased the whole part of the industry devoted to creating actual educational porn.

That’s why the third part of the book is probably my favourite. This section examines the intersections of feminist porn and scholarship. Some of the essays are by academics who write and teach about porn, whether it’s in a women’s studies or gender studies or film studies course. It’s really cool to hear about their experiences creating their syllabi, how they teach, the resistance or buy-in they’ve encountered from students or faculty or the public. As an educator, this all fascinates me. Similarly, as an educator and just someone who believes in good sex ed. in general, I loved reading the essays from Nina Hartley and Tristan Taormino, who explain both their rationales and their methodologies behind creating educational porn. This section also includes a standout essay by Ariane Cruz, who examines her complicated and conflicting feelings as a Black woman studying how porn represents Black women as part of her PhD. She explains the way that this has affected her life, her organization of her personal space at home, and how she relates to herself, to others, to her partner, to pornography.

The final section of this book showcases several feminist porn producers and performers, giving them a platform to explain their personal visions of what feminist porn should comprise. These essays are all fascinating in their own right. I have to admit that by the time I reached them, even though I was already reading this book one essay at a time alongside other books, I was feeling a little psychically fatigued, and I probably didn’t give these as much consideration as they are due.

The United States just passed a law (FOSTA/SESTA) heavily constraining the ways in which sex workers can communicate online. It’s ostensibly to help stop sex-trafficking. Being both Canadian and just very busy and unable to keep on top of every American political crisis, I honestly have not paid much attention to this one—but the sex workers I’ve seen speak about it are not happy, charging the proponents of this law with using it to restrict sex work, to legislate morality—and those are the voices I would listen to. While Canada might not have exactly the same issues, we aren’t necessarily better. Here in Ontario we are about to head into a provincial election, and the Conservative party is chomping at the bit to roll back relatively new curriculum with very progressive and healthy guidelines for teaching sex, sexuality, and gender. In some ways we live in a quite progressive era, yet in others we remain incredibly conservative and judgemental.

Whatever your personal stance on porn and sex work, the fact remains it’s a part of our society. There are people who do it. People who are exploited by it, people who exploit it, people who seek to dismantle and turn it inside out and make it feminist. It is, like any other industry or artistic endeavour or social moment, a complicated and diverse and non-monolithic phenomenon that deserves scrutiny, critique, and careful thought. What kind of society do I want? A feminist one. A sex-positive one. A safe one. And that means engaging with sex work and pornography, discussing it, listening to those involved and trying to steer policy in a way that protects vulnerable people without throwing hard-working people under the bus.

So it kind of seems like The Feminist Porn Book is more necessary today than ever. We need to talk more about sex. We need to stop twisting ourselves into contortions to try to sound both pro-porn or anti-porn depending on who’s listening. That isn’t the point. The point is that we should respect the autonomy and agency of sex workers and take our cues from them when it comes to dismantling and changing the problematic parts of their industry. If I want to talk reform of peer review, I’m going to listen to scientists. As a teacher, I hope my words carry weight when we talk about changing education. So if you are interested in learning more about porn and its intersections with feminism, racism, etc., then this is a great place to start.

But it’s only a start.

[Maya · Rating 1 out of 5]

The fact that people apologizing and working for the filmed rape industry can call themselves "feminists" just goes to show how meaningless that word has become.

[Jack Hart]

If this book were a machine it would be one that did a lot of different jobs and had a lot of moving parts. Moreover, it would come as a kit which one would have to put together for oneself in accordance with the particular uses that came to mind. The fact that it’s for an as yet largely uncreated audience makes it interesting, intriguing, and maybe important.

Several Good Reads reviews reckon with the fact that the book is not on the whole for them by suggesting that the reader skip over the essays whose language or point of view is unappealing. That’s probably good advice for any work composed of a large number of various voices. It’s also, though, worth noting that someone else is savoring and dwelling upon the very essays one samples and skips.

There are two stances one can take toward this reading fact. The first is traditional different-strokes-for-different-folks tolerance. You read yours, and I’ll read mine. But, the volume can be said to represent an opportunity for readerly edge play. The point, of course, is not to convert a squik-out to a turn-on, but to come to a comfortable familiarity with a range of embodied experience different than one’s own. Because without some sense of an active inquiry into intimate experience as it exists outside the range of one’s bodily memories, tolerance tends toward indifference, and mores all too easily pass themselves off as morality.

So The Feminist Porn Book offers, at a high level of abstraction, a safe place for a non-personal exploration of the philosophical form of the question: What is hot? By opening that seemingly conventional question up to also ask: For whom? When and where and how and why? And what innovations in hotness might be possible? And more specifically, what is hot when pornography prioritizes and celebrates female desire, pleasure, and orgasm?

Many of the pornographers writing here are quite forthcoming about making the kind of porn they wanted to see, but could not find on the market. Many of the professorial students of porn are as candid as they can manage to be about the mysteries of their own vexed taste for porn. It all makes for an unprecedented exploration of the category of “the hot.”

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If you’re like me you’ve heard the term “sex positive” often enough to realize it was deployed by some self-conscious group that aspired to be a movement, but you had no information concerning the activists, performers, writers, scholars, and entrepreneurs who made the movement go. The Feminist Porn Book serves as a kind of informal genealogical survey of some of that movement’s central voices.

One of the Amazon reviewers complained that “the same ten names are referenced over and over,” and while that’s true, to complain about it strikes me as ungenerous. That’s because these names often come up in the course of first person essays in which someone is celebrating or wrestling with their involvement with porn. As they explain their journey they cite the names of those they’ve met, argued with, and been influenced by. Assembling these “same ten names,” then, I would see as part of the book’s achievement.

In a few short decades the direct influence of the vital lives of Betty Dodson, Nina Hartley, and Susie Bright will be lost to living memory. The Feminist Porn Book includes memoir-essays by these founding figures, as well as well as a lot of grateful citation by women whose lives, thought, expression, and inner-composure achieved through sexual and intellectual exploration they’ve made possible.

I guess if you read a bunch of thank you notes as thank you notes they’d be pretty boring (unless they were written to you). But lines of gratitude are a way to enter the deeper mysteries of transmission, and are a crucial function of any writing whose aim is high influence.

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One of the things I admire about The Feminist Porn Book is the way it manages its relation to its powerful thousand-volumed older sister The Feminist Anti-Porn Book. As is recounted by several contributors, in the 1980’s some feminists’ advocacy of censoring sexual representations in the name of public morality was so powerful it became associated in the public mind with feminism itself.

Andrea Dworkin argued with passionate and influential conviction that because pornography dehumanized women it should be criminalized, and the law professor Catherine McKinnon made serious inroads in getting laws passed that would have allowed women to sue venues showing pornography for violating their civil rights. The essayist Robin Morgan coined WAP’s (Women Against Pornography) rallying cry: “Pornography is the theory, rape is the practice.” These abolitionist fears about the effects of representation were so powerfully set out in the 1980’s that one hears them voiced as instant reactions even today. For example in a Good Reads response to this book someone wrote, “The fact that people apologizing and working for the filmed rape industry can call themselves "feminists" just goes to show how meaningless that word has become.”

Confronted by this denunciation of their choices and decisions to participate in the porn industry, or introduce a porn canon and conditions-of-production-and-reception study into university curriculums, one might imagine that the women writing in The Feminist Porn Book might be a little irritated by their judgmental older sister. But, by and large, they don’t come across as counter-judgmental. Many acknowledge the provoking influence of the Dworkin-McKinnon arguments as they sought views that would square their experience of lived sexuality and encounters with porn. Perhaps coming to some kind of terms with one’s inner-puritan is a crucial part of any ethical development. But now, immersed in their own projects of creating an inclusive, ethical and consent-based pornography that is still hot and profitable, they are at peace with what they have to offer. Many are willing to be in dialogue with the sister who sees them as wretchedly misguided, but they do not seek her permission. They know what they are about and what they’re trying to do. They have porn to make, and a world to change.

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My favorite essay was “Imag(in)ing Possibilities: The Psychotherapeutic Potential of Queer Pornography.” It was written by the psychotherapist Keiko Lane, and like so many of these essays what made it good was her complication of a received interpretation. In this case it’s the one that says that an attraction to violent sex can only indicate the presence of a trauma history which must not be "acted out." The idea is that one seeks out degrading actual encounters (this is used to explain sex workers to themselves) or virtual ones (through a taste for rough sex pornography) in order to relive or reverse childhood abuse.

Now that this can happen is an agreed-upon thing, a premise that any competent therapist will have in mind. But that account of someone’s motivation is a small swath on a large spectrum, and there’s a tendency on the part of insight therapists to imagine it as the answer—the one about which the client must be convinced for the sake of her own self-knowledge.

So the story that Dr. Lane tells is of being “an out queer therapist” doing her internship and being assigned “a butch-identified dyke in her late twenties.” This client had in fact been sexually abused as a child, and had “fantasies of being in charge” which she borrowed from pornography “made by and for straight men.” Dr. Lane had some kind of discussion, largely undisclosed, with her client about her desire and its possible meanings and implications. Apparently the discussions did not focus on the danger of her desires—but left open the possibility that under the right circumstances they could be the source of mutual consensual pleasure and fulfillment.

After the session ended, I turned off the tape recorder. I had a brief fantasy of erasing the tape, because I didn’t sound like any of the neutral-toned psychoanalytic therapists in the case studies my supervisor had been giving me to read. My fantasies of erasing the tape, or even just misplacing it, were quickly supplanted by a sinking feeling of dread over sharing it with my supervisor.

It turns out that Dr. Lane’s forebodings were well founded. Her supervisor did not want her to discuss with her client the possibility of “healing enactments.”

I argued with my supervisor about this for weeks. She was interested in my idea about symbolized enactments, but still felt that my client was setting herself up to traumatize herself or someone else. Eventually she told me that I had to confront my client, to caution her against enacting her fantasies and urge her to explore them only verbally.

The young therapist did as she was told, and felt crappy about it—as if she’d betrayed her client’s courage in bringing forward her desire. The essay then pivots to describe “a class called Queer Bodies in Psychotherapy” which Dr. Lane teaches to graduate students in a clinical psychology program. It’s a class in which pornography is part of the curriculum for reasons she explains, and the issue of enactment presumably gets a fuller and more nuanced hearing than was available even just ten years ago.

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The most important thing about The Feminist Porn Book is that it documents and forwards an ongoing conversation. As I was writing this review Twitter told me that the second annual Feminist Porn Conference would be held on April third and fourth of 2014 at the University of Toronto's Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies. If the topic intrigues you, but after sampling this book you don’t share my enthusiasm for it, stay tuned: there’s more to come.

--

Here's a list of presentation titles for the 2014 Feminist Porn Conference referred to above.

Feminist Porn 101: What It Is, What It Isn’t, and Why It Matters

Consent & Authenticity: Interrogating Two Feminist Porn Tenets

Feminist/Porn Battlegrounds: Religion, The Law and…Tumblr

Theory/Practice: Masochistic Femininity and Feminist Kink Porn

Our Great Grand Queers: Porn Before WWII

Turned On: New Technologies, Sexual Interface & Feminist Erotic Media

Business Track: If You Build It, They Will .com: Feminist Porn Website Development & Troubleshooting

Race and Sexual Labor on Screen: Perspectives from a Performer, a Viewer, and an Academic

Research It, Archive It, Teach It, Do It: Sex Work in the Academy

Love the Whore You’re With: Self-Care & Allyship for Sex Workers

Turned On: New Technologies, Sexual Interface & Feminist Erotic Media

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Contrapuntal Reading

Glosswitch writes, "The underlying thought behind sex-positive feminism is conservative and unimaginative, fearing a sexless void should patriarchy ever vacate the space it currently fills." I find this a puzzling formulation, but here is a link to the essay.

"Sex Positive" Feminism doing patriarchy's work for it

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Conference Tweets

So the Conference is over, but Claire Litton helpfully created a storify tweet archive. Unfortunately I can't post a direct link because you have to have a Storify account to see it--but it's free to set one up, and only takes seconds. Then you can search Storify for "Feminist Porn Conference 2014: Day 2."

Or search Twitter for the Conference hashtag: #fpcon2

[Sarah · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'd like to start off by saying that I went into this book as a biased, anti-porn feminist. I do already hold strong beliefs on the topic of porn and I wasn't really expecting them to change from reading this book, though I was curious to see if they would shift at all.

On the back cover, reviewer and feminist pornographer Annie Sprinkle promised to eat her bra if this book didn't sway anti-porn feminists to the pro-porn side. I hope you have that bra handy, Ms. Sprinkle, because I didn't find that book to do that at all. This book seemed largely self-serving, made for feminists or individuals who are already on the pro-porn side, or at the very least, not against porn.

I was disappointed by Betty Dodson's comparison of emotional sexual assault victims to fascists and lynch mobs, simply because their dislike of porn came from an emotional, personal and traumatic place, which is apparently irrational. Clarissa Smith and Feona Attwood's article was basically a review of Gail Dines' Pornland where they took some of the more emotional parts from the book, acting as if her opinion on porn wasn't at all based on fact, conveniently leaving out any of the facts in her book, while also hardly providing any pro-porn facts of their own. Jane Ward claims we can take "queer" meaning from sexist and homophobic porn, despite the fact that this type of porn is largely highly detrimental to how society views women and queer people. Danny Wylde acknowledges that we don't truly know whether a porn scene is consensual or not, yet does not criticize that fact. These are some of the things I was most disappointed with in this book, and I found very little value in anything else.

There were two things I did appreciate the mention of, however:
1) Some of the contributors spoke to the importance of female sexuality being acknowledged and not portrayed in a negative light. Women's sexuality has been repressed in many parts of the world for much of history and it is important that women are not shamed for their sexuality. I am not anti-sex, though I am critical of it, believing that just because sex is not inherently bad, does not mean that all kinds of sex are good.
2) There was some writing about the concerns of anti-porn feminists banding together with conservatives to criticize porn, and the worry that if pornography was banned, sexual health information, abortion information/access and LGBT resources might be too. I understand these concerns and do not see a benefit in working with conservative groups who, just like many working in the porn industry, hold negative views of women and our sexuality and wish to largely repress it.
These are things I'll be aware of as I continue to educate and talk about why I'm anti pornography.

I do understand how this new brand of "feminist" porn can empower individual women, however, as long as the mainstream industry exists which exploits and degrades women, as well as doesn't care for their consent, I will be opposed to pornography.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

An insightful and fascinating collection of essays from many different perspectives and backgrounds. Proof that pornography needs more academic study; that it belongs in any media and sexuality curriculum; that it plays many roles in our culture. Some of the essays get bogged down in overly academic terminology, to the point of being difficult to read, but all are worthy reads that challenge assumptions and the tropes of mainstream pornography.

[Jessica Silk · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was *really* excited to get my hands on this book because it's such an important (and fun!) topic. However, since it's a collection of essays, my engagement with the pieces varied tremendously and left me wanting.

What I didn't like: Even though I benefit from educational privilege, have taken feminist theory courses, and have read all kinds of "high brow" theory, most of the more "academic" pieces were very difficult to read--either due to overly academic language or because the arguments were often unclear/bad/lazy or referenced too many other writers/works without providing summaries of said works. I think smart folks can (and should) write in clear ways that make their points in a more accessible fashion.

What I did like: The pieces that were more personal (for instance, most of the pieces where sex workers wrote from their OWN experiences, desires, beliefs) were so much more interesting, accessible, and thought-provoking than the more academic writings. Fortunately, there were many of these and they covered a wide range of topics, including providing a historical context and looking at the intersections of gender identity, sexual identity, race/ethnicity, ability, etc.

I understand the need to have multiple standpoints and types of writing in one collection, but *for me* the more personal/first-hand pieces were so much better that they just made a lot of the theoretical/cultural criticism pieces seem really vague and lacking in their arguments. For example, it was hard to read Celine Parrenas Shimizu's analysis of Keni Style's behaviors in Tristan Taormino's "Rough Sex 3" because it's all speculation--which is especially limited after reading other folks speaking from their *own* experience.

Maybe what bothers me is that when it comes to something as personal as sexuality, every nuance is really important and it's hard to analyze other people's intentions or experiences or desires unless we explicitly ask them, right? So how do we go about analyzing other people's behaviors or intentions and apply them to our own theories/arguments unless we ask them? And what does it mean to use someone else's behaviors/choices for our own arguments? This is a huge limitation for me.

I wish I had more examples, but since it was hard for me to stay engaged while reading this book, it took me a few months to get to all the pieces.

[Lobo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Książka bardziej o pornografach niż pornografii. Jednocześnie bardzo podstawowa i bardzo zaawanasowana. Podstawowa, bo przedstawia z każdej możliwej strony cały ruch feministycznej pornografii, walki o porno lat 70. i 80., kreśli sylwetki najważniejszych osób związanych z produkcją feministycznej i queerowej pornografii. Najbardziej podstawowe informacje z zakresu „kto”, „co” i „kiedy”. Stanowi też dobry przewodnik po ujęciu pornografii w dyskursie akademickim. To praktyczne leksykon, po jakie książki sięgać, aby ogarnąć temat w pełni. Konfrontuje stanowiska i podejścia. Najciekawszą częścią rzeczywiście jest przedstawienie doświadczenia pornografów, dopuszczenie ich do głosu, pozwolenie, aby sami wypowiadali się o tym, czym jest dla nich porno i po co je robią. Z drugiej ich, ich doświadczenie właśnie wchodzi bardzo głęboko w funkcjonowanie rasizmu, seksizmu i homofobii w przemyśle pornograficznym i w społecznym konstruowaniu seksualności. To fascynująca lektura.

[Silence Welder · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was amazing. It was great to hear so many stories in the words of varied porn performers and educators. It's a 'proper' academic text with references and studies, but also personal accounts and opinions. Altogether enlightening, informative and encouraging.

It made me want to read the work of anti-porn activists too, to hear their side of the argument(s) and to make my own decisions. An important and worthwhile book in my opinion.

[Alyssa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of essays is written by an interesting mix of scholars, performers, and directors (with some who are all 3). It gives an in-depth, diverse view of an industry that is so often depicted as a "big bad", but is in fact as nuanced as any other.

[Jasmine · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ugh.

[Lisa Thompson · Rating 5 out of 5]

At first I wasn't a fan...but I have become more appreciative of the book as I read. I am particularly happy about how several authors have discussed race and sexism using an intersectional approach. Highlighting how the porn industry uses racist tactics to exploit women of color's sexuality is unacceptable. Thank you to all feminist porn scholars, pornographers, workers for standing against an industry that promotes racism and sexism for wealth!

[Dylan Horrocks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yes, yes, yes! Hell, yes! Made me wish I could move to Santa Barbara and take Constance Penley's course on porn (among other things). I don't have time to write a proper review (deadlines call), but read this book. The perfect antidote to Gail Dines et al.

[Amanda Hobson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read for anyone interested in pornography studies and feminist pornography and would be valuable for anyone who does visual culture, film, and feminist studies.

[Begoña · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you speak English, read it now. Si habláis español, también hay una versión en español. ;)

[Chiara Lou · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting anthology of writings on feminist porn. One of the strengths of the book is for sure the wide range of contributors, both in terms of diversity (there's writings by queer, trans, black and disabled pornographers, porn stars and critics) and in terms of including works by people behind the camera, in front of the camera and in academia. However, the book only takes a positive stance towards porn and fails to initiate a differentiated discussion on the industry and the shortcomings of (feminist) porn.

[Gabby Humphreys · Rating 4 out of 5]

The feminist porn book is top tier in my humble opinion. If feminist porn academics and feminist porn workers all shagged, this would be their squealing love child, here to tell you all their parents’ gossip on the matter.

This is a hefty 432 pages and the text is small as fuck. It’s dense, textbook style writing and it’s a lot to read in a short amount of time. But, me complaining about the amount of content seems silly bc it was 10/10 all the way through. Just take your time and go a section or two a day for a lovely month long project.

One thing I love about this book is how many voices are in this book. Essentially it’s short essays, written by a tonne of different people. Not only does this mean The feminist porn book is inclusive in terms sexuality/race/gender, this also means the book gives a full range of perspectives and paints a complete picture. I did expect this book would maybe be a lil more technical, but I actually loved the surprisingly personal feel of this textbook and wouldn’t change its format. This also gained textbook brownie points because everything is clearly referenced at the end of each chapter- music to my academic ears.

I feel like this book isn’t amazing for going in depth about, say, a specific theory or trend, but by piecing together so many peoples voices on feminism and porn, an amazing overview is provided which will leave you brewing with thoughts.

Also this book has the prefect flop so u don’t even have to hold the pages open- now we’re talking.

(@humph_reads)

[Laura · Rating 2 out of 5]

Entre los numerosos debates del feminismo que aún siguen sin cerrarse se encuentra la discusión de si los trabajos vinculados a la sexualidad constituyen una salida laboral aceptable, e incluso empoderante, para las mujeres; lo cual, encierra la sórdida cuestión de si el cuerpo puede constituirse como mercancía.
Es este último aspecto lo que hace que, por ejemplo, me identifique firmemente como abolicionista en relación a la prostitución, porque entiendo que no puede construirse ningún modelo de sistema prostitucional en el que el uso del cuerpo, las prácticas y, en definitiva, el consentimiento, no estén supeditados (en la mayoría de trabajadoras) a una urgente necesidad económica o al control de redes de tráfico de personas.
Sin embargo, en el caso del porno, siempre he tenido sentimientos encontrados. Primero, por el clásico debate de qué es lo que se define por pornografía (ya que, muchas representaciones artísticas sin una práctica de sexo real de por medio han sido tildadas de pornografía), lo cual es algo que depende de la mirada del receptor. Segundo, por pensar la posibilidad de que el porno pueda servir como un medio audiovisual que sea capaz de educar a las personas que lo consumen, favoreciendo representaciones en las que se rompan con estereotipos, se vea explícitamente el diálogo, el consenso y la protección frente a its; y ampliando el imaginario sexual de una manera que se favorezca una sexualidad satisfactoria y sana. Y tercero, por conocer la existencia de muchas productoras en las que se cuidan y respetan los derechos de los trabajadores involucrados (incluyendo prácticas consensuadas, parejas con las que desean rodar, protección frente a its y, por supuesto, un buen sueldo y horario), lo que permite contemplar la idea de que esta industria pueda regularse adecuadamente y que huya de cualquier forma de explotación.
Cuando empecé a leerme este libro, lo hice con la idea de encontrar un debate entre el por qué el porno podía ser socialmente constructivo y entre una posición opuesta (que claramente existe) que me hiciera replantearme los postulados de mi idealista argumentario que he expuesto antes, así como un análisis documentado de cómo funciona la industria en general y de la posibilidad de regularla a nivel internacional para establecer unos derechos laborales básicos y el pleno derecho de uso sobre su imagen. Nada de eso, el libro se limita a exponer testimonios de directoras, educadoras sexuales, especialistas en estudios de género y actores hablando de las bondades que el porno les ha brindado en el desarrollo de su vida sexual; cayendo a veces, en mi opinión, en una forma de publicidad subliminal de la pornografía de Tristan Taormino y otras productoras implicadas en la redacción del libro, aislando todo el debate (o hablando escasamente de ello) del hecho de que la industria de la pornografía está fundamentalmente controlada por hombres, en donde la mayor parte del contenido que circula por internet representa una sexualidad en el que la comodidad y el placer del mujer se encuentran en un segundo plano, donde existe una gran restricción en relación a las prácticas y cánones corporales y "exotizando" cualquier representación que se salga de esos parámetros, así como de la influencia que ejerce actualmente el porno mainstream en la manera que los hombres se educan y conciben la sexualidad. Es decir, basan todo su ideario en el hecho de que, para que la industria mejore, las personas tienen que aprender a consumir otro tipo de pornografía. Generalmente, mucho menos accesible.


Conclusión: Si buscas un libro sobre si existen alternativas al porno tradicional y una posible salida feminista para el mismo, tal vez pueda servirte a título informativo.
Si buscas elaborarte una opinión formada en relación al porno, olvídalo.

[Luke Noir · Rating 4 out of 5]

This series of essays is best approached as a range of opinions on how we view sexuality. The writing is not all of one piece; some works are highly academic, others practically confessionals on paper. Some contributors even break essential pieces of intersectionality in their writings, pulling me out of the work.

Arousal is not the point, and it was rare; instead this is a book about how people break out of the boxes we put "sex" into, and deliver their visions of such into the world. It gains it's power by being nearly "punk" in the way it views erotic work creation and distribution, while generally being honest (from what I know) to how that kind of work is seen in the larger culture.

I wish Shine Louise Huston had written for it, if I was to name one clear gap -- she's mentioned a number of times in the later essays, and her impact on the field is so great I'd loved to have heard of it in her own words.

[Alex N · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book, and I would recommend it to anyone struggling to define their feelings on pornography. Even if you have strong feelings either way, there's a lot to be learned from this book. The production of feminist porn, and the essays in this book span queer theory, gender theory, representation politics and so much more. The book is a great introduction to other literature on sex work and pornography, and accessible if you've never read anything about sex work before. It also is a great historical reminder (or introduction) to the divide between feminists and pornography, as well as the ways in which this divide remains. A great read!

[Andi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent and mostly very accessible collection of essays. A few of them veer into pretty dry or heady academic territory, but those are well balanced by several very direct and personal pieces. The book does a good job of digging into complex issues from several points of view, and raises many essential points for discussion without appearing to harp on any one specific conclusion. The essays are also mostly short, averaging around 8-12 pages, meaning it's easy to pick up and read two or three at a time without feeling overwhelmed or zoning out and missing bits. I would absolutely recommend this collection to anyone with a serious interest in the world of feminist porn.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

At this rate, I expect most anthologies to be a compendium of "meh" with a couple awesome pieces and a couple terrible pieces thrown in to spice things up.

With those expectations, these essays were a pleasant surprise. Some essays got a bit repetitive (more in the first half than the second half), and some of the scholastic essays were so over-the-top filled with "scholarly" ten-dollar words you juts KNEW the authors felt like they had something to prove, but... overall, really interesting.

What an odd niche market for a book. I'm glad I read it.

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. It was both a scholarly rigorous and deeply personal look at an emerging industry. Focusing on increasing diversity in body types, pleasure modalities and queer voices in porn, this books adopts a sex positive way to both produce and consume pornography. While not every subject floated my boat, the sincere and articulate voices within this book spoke to a community seeking to break away from the limiting (and debilitating) view that their is just one way to be sexy.

[Kaity Molé · Rating 5 out of 5]

Feminism + porn= all the things I love. Awesome essays by Tristan Taormino, Nina Hartley, Jane Ward, April Flores, Dylan Ryan, lots of essays by awesome queer and trans folks. Such a good read! So much underlining and so many notes in the margins processing super rad concepts and experiences that were shared :-D

[Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

A mix of hard academic analysis and personal essays that together spark enormous insight into a range of feminist porn topics. Each small glimpse makes you want to learn more about the sub-topic covered. The final essay, by Loree Erickson, on disability and sexuality, was a personal favorite.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Working my way through it. Love it.

More here: http://feministallies.blogspot.com/se...

[Chris Lowrance · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm biased as both friends and coworkers contributed and are discussed in this set of essays, but I think this is fundamental reading for anyone with an opinion on pornography and feminism.

[Diane · Rating 3 out of 5]

The saga continues...is porn feminist or not...ergh.

[Kenya Wright · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a pretty dry read on such a colorful topic. I'm not sure why they made the writing so dense but there were some parts I enjoyed and others I was like. . .uhhhh what the fuck?