Is there such a thing as ethical porn?

http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2014/nov/01/ethical-porn-fair-trade-sex

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They mainly call it ethical porn, though some people call it “fair trade”. The term “free range” was essayed, but its agricultural connotations have proved too strong. “It’s the kind of porn you would buy in Waitrose,” is how D, 40, described it. He is one of the boyfriends and sometime co-star of Pandora Blake, 29, who runs a site called Dreams Of Spanking.

“You’re making the audience into better people?” I asked him.

“No,” D replied, “you’re allowing them to be the nice people they already are, and not have to compromise that to watch some porn.”

We were upstairs in Dirty Dicks, opposite Liverpool Street station in London, where the cast and crew of Dreams Of Spanking were having a party. I guess I should explain a bit about the kind of porn they make, although the name is pretty self-explanatory. A lot of people get spanked, in a lot of different scenarios. Blake has a major objection to spanking scenes in which the punishment happens for a stupid reason. She doesn’t like porn in which the actors can’t act. Her setups are curiously domestic and quotidian (a woman gets spanked by her landlady because she forgot to feed the cat; a different woman gets spanked by her boyfriend in the bath because she splashes him on purpose). The acting is like watching a video of a school play performed by a person who went on to become famous. They can do it, in other words, but the production values and the atmosphere make it seem amateurish and more human – ditto, the body types, which are pretty varied, as body types are in real life. It is incredibly confronting to watch, in the sense that you do feel as though you’re watching an actual sexual moment between one person and another.

I have confronted my views on porn only once, in 2011, at a UK Feminista meeting, 1,000 women strong. Someone in the audience said, “Exactly what’s wrong with me getting off on Debbie Does Dallas with my boyfriend?” An audible part of the audience was instantly furious: porn was exploitative, it was impossible to make porn without damaging the women who performed in it. Plus, when she said she “got off”, what she really meant was that she’d internalised her boyfriend’s sexual pleasure. I was conflicted: the kind of people who say porn is exploitative, physically and psychologically, are generally the people with whom I agree on everything. Yet, in this one particularity, I cannot agree with deciding women are being exploited unless they say they are. And, much more trenchantly, I cannot agree with adjudicating what someone else gets off on. Even if she is turned on by a fantasy that traduces your political beliefs (and her own), sexual fantasy is a sacred thing; you can’t argue it away, and nor should you want to. And the key argument, that it causes male violence, I don’t buy; what we watch might influence the way we behave, but not in obvious ways that you can map. It was, in other words, a total conflict, and the rogue factor was that I don’t watch porn. So I could just absent myself into neutrality. (I think I was chairing the meeting, so I was meant to be neutral anyway.)

A bland non-opinion is the easiest way in this combustible arena. And mainstream porn seems to deliberately court non-opinion, in its cultivated artificiality. You can say what you like about mainstream porn, but you cannot say that it looks real. In the way that the men are just torsos and penises, and the women are made up and cut up to be indistinguishable, it doesn’t look that human. It will, I imagine, soon be entirely replaced by CGI, from which it’s already almost indistinguishable.

What Blake does could never be generated by a computer. The film she’s making – a futuristic dystopia in which men have been abolished – sounds a bit muesli on paper; but the landscape of bondage, fetish and futurism is incredibly unmuesli. The shoot looks pretty lo-fi (Blake’s flat, which she sometimes uses as a location, looks like the home of a young academic, who for some reason needs high-spec recording equipment). Confusingly, you can see real human beings in Blake’s films. Even more confusingly, I love it.

Dreams Of Spanking is, as Blake says, a “niche within a niche”. Nimue Allen, 30, makes less elaborately plotted, more fetishistic porn; Ms Naughty, on her site, Bright Desire, makes very coupley, loving porn, from Canberra; Madison Young makes densely and imaginatively plotted, BDSM-flavoured porn that I want to call bisexual, but don’t feel that quite conveys the unpindownability of its sexual leaning.

A common assumption is that “fair-trade” porn is going to be very soft and wholemeal and respectful; some of it is, but most of it isn’t. It does address female sexuality in a way that mainstream porn doesn’t (how you go from “female gaze” to “wholemeal” is, of course, via the misapprehension that female sexuality is really sweet). “This image of ethical porn is pretty and fluffy and storyline-driven, a hardcore version of daytime soap operas or Harlequin romance novels,” says Sinnamon Love, previously a performer, now a “sex educator”. “But a lot of women, especially of this younger generation, are looking for more hardcore porn that’s to their taste.”

You won’t get the same angles in ethical porn as you would in the mainstream, and this isn’t just female versus male gaze; this is human versus robot gaze. Nimue Allen explains: “I have tried shooting sex scenes as mainstream porn does, so that you get the graphic close-ups. I did one scene like that and thought, ‘This does not feel good.’ There is not any reason to get into those ridiculous, contorted positions, other than to allow a camera to see what’s going on.” AJ, 32, who is Pandora Blake’s PA, interjects in a practical voice: “If you’re jizzing, I don’t want to see you jizzing. I want to see your face.”

(“God, I’m old,” I thought. “Incredibly old and prudish.” And then I thought, “I wonder how you spell jizzing?”)

Feminism is not a prerequisite when it comes to making ethical porn, Blake says. “Feminist porn is explicitly focused on women’s desires and sexuality. So, for example, the belt-whipping scene where I got the life thrashed out of me, that I would say is feminist, because it’s about my journey and my sexuality. Whereas I think it’s possible to produce male-gaze porn in an ethical and fair trade way. That means complete respect for performers, for their boundaries and consent. If someone says no, you don’t ask again, you don’t ask last minute in the middle of a scene. You don’t trick them into doing stuff. You pay them. It’s not only all of those principles, but also communicating that to your audience.”

People protesting against porn and sex work take as their opening position that nobody would be doing it if they weren’t coerced, or so desperate for money that it amounted to coercion. Ms Naughty insists that the porn she produces is not done this way: “There’s this urban myth that all of the women in porn are drug addicts or abused and don’t know what they’re doing.” She doesn’t say this never happens, that nobody is ever on drugs; but when you look at what she makes, you’ve never seen couples who look so consensual, so un-ground down by the heel of life.

“I want to make it explicit to the viewer that, no, this hasn’t been produced in that way. I’m going to depict them respectfully, but they’re also having a say in how that depiction is going to come across. I’m not going to say, ‘Shave off your pubic hair.’ I have a respect for the bodily autonomy of my performers. I’m not going to say, ‘Go and lose five kilos, you’re too fat.’” Nimue Allen takes a view of pornography as real sex turned into ventriloquised desire – the performers would be doing these things anyway, and the filming of it only adds to their titillation.

Blake says: “When you read them [anti-porn feminists], it’s very obvious that they’ve typed ‘hardcore gonzo’ into Google and watched the free stuff. They’re obsessed with the worst of it.”

Noelle Nica is a pornographer whom feminists rate – several of her films have won at the feminist porn awards – but she resists the label “feminist pornographer”. In fact, feminists irritate her. “I never liked watching boy/girl porn, because I felt the men were depicted as grunting Neanderthals. The objectification of men in porn was that extreme. And on the practical, economic side, men make much less per scene than women do because they’re viewed as less important. That’s another little detail that would have feminists up in arms if the situation were reversed. Yet nobody rallies to get equal pay for male performers.”

Now that is a new angle in the porn conversation: is it actually the men who are ill-treated? Or is that just a cheap reversal of expectation to derail the feminist argument – a kind of Fathers4Justice, only naked?

Danny Wylde recently had to give up a career as a performer in pornographic films after getting priapism as a result of erectile drugs for the third time in eight years. “I received word from the doctor in the emergency room that the more often this happens, the more likelihood of you losing the ability to get an erection, period.” The industry doesn’t cover health insurance. Porn actors are paid by the scene, which gives them a precarious, zero-hours type of professional life; there are few divas, and a lot of people who feel quite dispensable and would sooner take Viagra than cause a hold-up. “As far as taking the drugs,” Wylde recalls equably, “I would not say that it’s something that porn producers openly tell you to do. You figure it out by talking to people. It’s a status quo… Look, it’s exploitative in the fact that it’s a capitalist industry and it exploits labour and so forth. But are people here against their will? I don’t think that’s true.”

It’s undeniable that the porn industry is dominated by men, and the more commercial pressure it comes under, the more repetitive and violent this has made it. Women making porn tend to be independent, and they tend to be making the kind of porn they’d want to watch, which means they allow in the possibility that you don’t have to screw people just to watch them screwing.

Madison Young started out as a performer in sex-positive porn, making films with her then girlfriend (the sex-positive movement is one that holds “all consensual sexual activities to be fundamentally healthy and pleasurable”). She then did a mixture of mainstream porn and bondage and fetish modelling, before becoming a director herself. She has a very cool delivery, as if observing tiny things down a microscope. “Fetish and bondage modelling was very much based on skill, flexibility, endurance. A lot of positions are challenging; dance students are big in bondage. It tends to be a more cerebral crowd in general. In the first several years, I would do strap-on play and do modelling with women. And in 2006 I started working in mainstream porn in LA.”

When people in porn describe the shortcomings of the mainstream, it’s not really in sexual terms. Cindy Gallop, who started the website Make Love Not Porn, says: “All the issues that worry people about porn are actually business issues. It has become so big, it now has norms and rules and conventions, which is why so much of it is repetitive and boring. Everyone in the sector competes with everyone else in the sector by doing exactly the same as everyone else.”

Madison Young makes an analogy with fast food: “The way they have made it more exciting is to add more meat to the sandwich. The chicken, bacon, Double Whopper with barbecue sauce. How many animals had to die for that?”

And her experiences making mainstream porn were similar: “A bunch of guys saying, ‘Stick peg A into hole B and we’ll make this much money.’ I had to be an aggressive communicator. I really had to stand up for, like, ‘This is the way I like to be touched, this is what I’m OK with, this is how I want to connect with you. How do you like to be touched?’ The director often just didn’t get it, and would be like, ‘Oh, in five minutes, we’d like you to fake an orgasm.’”

When I roam porn/porn-critical chatrooms, they’re full of people muttering darkly about how ethical porn has been co-opted by the mainstream and has big-studio money behind it. It’s the classic modern double bind: if you look slick, then you’re part of the machine; and if you don’t, you’re too small or weird to count.

It’s noticeable that fourth-wave feminists (this is a term I use to mean “younger than me”) take a different stance, in tone and content. Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, who co-founded the feminist blog the Vagenda and is in favour of more female-friendly porn, says: “It feels unnatural to be completely against pornography, having grown up in a culture that’s so saturated in sex. I remember being a teenager when Christina Aguilera had just done her Dirrty video; that to my mother was pornographic, but that to me was normal. I think arguments that are anti-porn do ignore the testimonies of lots of women who are themselves in the sex industry. You’re telling women what they can and can’t do, you’re telling women what they should find arousing and what they shouldn’t.”

Everyone I met at Dreams Of Spanking, or talked to in the porn world, seemed so certain that all the industry needs is a road map, somebody curating and navigating, so that people will just stop visiting the ugly parts, that I almost forget what there is to object to.

Then I read this description of a scene in Gail Dines’s book about racism in porn, Pornland: a black woman who hates white men has sex with them anyway for $1,000 because her children are hungry. It’s the sheer lack of empathy – that anyone would want to get off on this ragbag of child malnutrition and maternal humiliation. I find that much more appalling than classic gonzo porn scenes, and far more fetishistic than spanking or nipple clamps. Mainstream porn dehumanises. Whether that’s by turning all its players into body parts, erasing their differences, adding some crappy racist backstory, the result is the same: sex remade as alienated, solitary, bitter and ugly, the exact opposite of what it’s about.

On the sheer nastiness in a lot of the mainstream, anti-porn campaigners and ethical pornographers are in agreement – as Cindy Gallop says: “I realised six or seven years ago, through direct personal experience dating younger men, that we simply can’t afford to carry on the way we’re going. We can’t have young people learn about sex through this kind of porn.”

It’s not that there is no violence in ethical porn. Truthfully, a lot of what they make, and what they watch, is quite violent. Pandora Blake has just bought a membership to crashpadseries.com, “which is a queer radical feminist site that’s been running for 14 years. The premise is that there’s this apartment – if you’re in the know, you’ve got a key. If you meet someone hot, you go there. There are cameras. It’s got some really good consensual dominance, submission. You know, rough sex, which is what I like. But I know how it’s made, I don’t have any anxiety about how it was created.”

There is an interesting side point, about what happens to porn when it is democratised, how instantly it explodes into a thousand different kinks. “As an exercise,” Blake says, “look at a Clips 4 Sale list. Make sure you’re sitting down. It hosts pay-per-download fetish content. Very low production values, cheap overheads. They’ve got 500 categories. You have no idea of the beautiful variety of human sexuality until you’ve cast your eye over this list. Eyeball licking… snot” (the only time I was too squeamish to hit “enter” was the subheading “Cats”). It’s interesting because that site was originally conceived to host regular user-made porn, and just got colonised incredibly fast. It seems that the more the sex industry tries to hammer us into one sexual identity, the more we rebel with riotous weirdness.

Makers of ethical porn believe you can have a violent fantasy, of any kind, and that can be a legitimate part of your sexual identity, one that you have a right to explore. This is the point at which anti-porn campaigners stick. There is a chasm here, between people who think that all violence in sex is the result of a patriarchal culture and will lead to violence in real life, and should be stamped out; and people who think that all fantasy is legitimate, and almost all of it can be legitimately met by porn.

AJ, Blake’s assistant, says: “When people chase after paedophilic fantasies, it’s very hard to satisfy them in a way that isn’t damaging someone. But it’s perfectly possible to seek out rape fantasies in a way that isn’t.”

Julie Bindel, feminist and activist, is scathing about this. “Put it this way, if I had a fantasy about having a black woman on her hands and knees scrubbing my kitchen floor and saying, ‘Yes madam, no madam’, yes, I would quash it.”

“The religious right and the feminist left have been indivisible to me,” says Nina Hartley, a veteran porn star. “People who are suffering from sexual guilt, sexual anything, their suffering is as real as a broken leg, it’s as real as cancer. They need someone who can tend to them. Who will say, ‘Your sexual desires don’t disgust me, they don’t freak me out.’”

And perhaps this is the sophistication of ethical porn: without exploiting or harming the participants, it allows you to explore what you’re into. You have a right not to be ashamed. This, says Cindy Gallop, gives us our cue about how to talk about porn: “When you force anything into the darkness, you make it much easier for bad things to happen, and much harder for good things to happen. The answer is not to shut down. The answer is to open up.”