"The real gauge of the sexual freedom of a society isn't the liberty accorded to its men, but the liberty accorded to its women." Laura Miller

Warning: this essay contains images NSFW.

Part 1 can be read here
Part 11 can be read here
Part 111 can be read here

Continued after the jump

No topic is as divisive as pornography. Proponents that are for or against censorship remain glued to opposite poles; it has created a deep schism within the women’s movement with one side claiming that pornography is degrading to women while the other side proposes that accepting pornography as is will disassociate shame from female sexuality. Although, currently, a tentative effort is being made by both groups to revisit and reconcile these two dissenting positions.

Nevertheless, whatever the views, we can all agree that pornography always has been and still is phallocentric with the subgenre of pornography for women only having been a recent phenomenon. For a long time it was assumed that pornography was the domain of the male psyche ascribed to, as all culturally induced polarized gender traits are, the natural biology of men. As Gayle Rubin noted, "part of the modern ideology of sex is that lust is the province of men, purity that of women." However, recent scientific studies and statistics clearly show that to be a false statement. Consider this: One-in-three visitors to adult-entertainment websites are female – a figure that may even be higher since 70% hide their porn use. This demonstrates that, just like men, women are visual creatures many of whom have an insatiable hunger for erotic images and videos although not necessarily those on offer in mainstream pornography, which, I believe, are for the most part, degrading to women.

Some of women’s complaints about mainstream pornography are that the acts speak exclusively to male desires with endless blowjobs; men coming all over women’s faces; gross and disgusting acts such as ass to mouth; impossible positions; acts that are increasingly violent, and that it’s mostly ugly guys fucking artificially enhanced women. The fact that women find many male porn actors unattractive seems to be a common thread. Why this discrepancy in the level of attractiveness between male and female porn stars or in the depictions of men and women in the media, for that matter?

While men have given themselves the freedom to broadcast often and widely the fact that they enjoy looking at beautiful women, women on the other hand, have throughout the ages, been denied a public expression of their admiration for beautiful men. As a result, the belief that women do not appreciate looking at beautiful men as much as men enjoy the sight of an attractive woman is a delusion that persists. In fact, men like to remind women ad nauseam that they enjoy looking at beautiful women, or, like to exclaim excitedly they saw one as if to reassure themselves they are ‘real’ men and to ensure that ‘all’ women remember they are primarily defined by their looks. And for women, if you are denied a natural expression long enough the absence of it will appear ‘natural’. Again, denial of to the existence of a female gaze continues to be perpetuated and, ironically, is not challenged and is even reinforced by a few women who claim to be feminists.

Since from the day they are born, women are practically spoon fed solely with images of sexy and beautiful women, even in women’s magazines, it’s not surprising that these depictions can evoke an erotic response (for men) in some heterosexual females. As Suraya Singh, the publisher of Filament Magazine notes: (a) images of men designed for straight women (as opposed to gay men) are rare to the point of being practically non-existent, and (b) we’re only ever offered images of women’s bodies – in psychology, this is called “adaptive preference" – where we experience or even strongly express enjoyment of something, in the context of not having other options, because it makes us feel like we’re making a choice". The male image society has created for women to admire resembles the masculine ideal of a gender polarized society; Tarzan, Hulk Hogan, Superman, and football players to name but a few. What is ignored however, is the fact that many women find men with more feminine features far more attractive.

Nevertheless, resistance to the existence of an authentic female gaze remains. In an article that announced the launch of Filament Magazine, a quarterly publication that focuses on hetero female fantasies and desires, Singh was referred to as ‘an ugly duckling’ and called ‘mentally deranged’ by male commenters some of whom also hoped for predicted its early demise. In addition, an article in the Daily Mail, a UK newspaper that only hires women willing to defend the dominator culture, expressed dismay at the idea of a female gaze. "So why do we persist in pretending we're just like men", the female author asked. Erotic fiction writers Kristina Lloyd and Mathilde Madden provided the following response "Filament isn't seeking to turn the tables in an act of vengeance. Instead, it's asking for women to be acknowledged as human beings who can look and lust just as men can." In addition, Filament Magazine was also turned down by numerous UK distributors who objected to a woman’s magazine having a sexy man on the cover. To add insult to injury, the printers of the first issue refused to print the second publication because it included an image of an erect penis.

Then there is also the huge market of explicit erotic fiction written by women for women. Fiction writer Kristina Lloyd is incensed that the covers of many of these books continue to display images of naked women or their body parts. She states that: Straight women are bizarrely assumed to be uninterested in looking at the object of their desires … and that it is about men protecting their self-proclaimed right not to be reduced to women's sexualized commodities." Clearly, the view of what constitutes female sexuality is based on the self-fulfilling prophesies of the prevailing culture whose biggest false meme is that "men need sex more than women". This idea is reinforced by blocking women from expressing their true desires so that the concocted dominator position on female sexuality can continue to be tightly packaged and delivered to society with a ‘do not return’ stamp. (Jeff Fecke provides a good response to Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen who insinuates that men need sex more than women.)

However, leave it up to young women and their raging hormones to circumvent the restrictive rules and to fool the patriarchy. When in early 2000, the Harry Potter movies appeared in the cultural landscape, many girls couldn’t help but fantasize about the gorgeous looking and very young magicians that hogged the screen – it offered a perfect opportunity for them to explore their frustrated sexuality. Welcome to Harry Potter porn. Produced and consumed mostly by young women, naughty Harry Potter stories belong to the larger online phenomenon called slash fiction. Since many females have culturally induced inhibitions about publically expressing their girl/boy fantasies they cleverly changed the Potter boys’ sexual orientation. The girls let the magicians have sexual trysts with each other while they themselves became eager spectators who savored the many tales of hot boy-on-broomstick action that ensued. Some slashers say that they just find two men together to be hot, just as men like watching Lesbian porn. James Lear, an author of gay erotic fiction, whose books have a large female following, concurs. He notes that "Women are dissatisfied with the traditional roles they’re given in m/f books and films and are looking for material that takes them on a wider imaginative journey; gay porn (m/m) has a liberating effect on their imagination." Then there is also a new magazine named Syzygy that features quality original fiction and photography, all of it male/male erotica aimed at a female audience. Despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of young women enjoyed Harry Potter porn, the phenomenon was considered to be ‘not normal’.

Nevertheless, today, the genre "pornography for women" is expanding and continues on its march away from the traditional notion of what constitutes female sexuality – a sexuality that exists at birth, that is natural and straight forward but that is made ‘complex’ by a society that fears it. While early feminist porn, although produced ethically, was still made with men in mind, the current crop of female adult cinematographers are responding to the deep yearning of women for porn that puts their desires first. Understandably, the search for what women want is ongoing since women have learned, as a matter of survival, to be adept at shaping male fantasies to their own purposes. Take for example, the rape fantasy.

Far from being traitors to their own kind, women who indulge in rape fantasies disguise themselves and poly-identify; they transform and appropriate a prototypical narrative that inherently dismisses the possibility for them to access power, especially in order to reach sexual satisfaction. Bakhtin qualifies the carnival as a “site of insurgency,” a potentially apt term to apply to rape fantasies as well. They enable the fantasizing subject to use an oppressive culture over which she has no agency, by a clandestine appropriation of cultural “products,” i.e. the omnipresence of rape. They form a repeated poaching of a territory that does not belong to the subject and that was not intended to be twisted in such a way. Source

Simply put, it is a fantasy of a forced sexual tryst that is controlled by the woman herself; she is the sole choreographer of the scene. The rapist is always young, very good-looking and does not use a weapon of any kind. The act basically involves being devoured by a man whose extreme passion has gotten the better of him. Come to think of it, maybe we should call it a ‘devour fantasy’ to eliminate the stigma attached to ‘rape fantasy’ from which emanates the false assumption that women secretly enjoy being raped in ‘real’ life.

As for BDSM, Christina Lloyd explains how to reconcile this fantasy with the principles of feminism.

So my sexuality entails some sort of playing out or mirroring of our society’s gender-based power imbalances. In short, he tops me in bed. And there it ends. I try hard in my writing to convey that women can have M/f sex without being blind or indifferent to the ideological and social structures which make for a world which favors men; that women can have kinky submissive sex without that reinforcing the status quo, without them being plagued by some misplaced feminist guilt; that women can actively participate in their own sexual subjugation and find it super-hot. Source

Even so, I would feel less conflicted about BDSM if the dynamics didn’t mirror the real world where the power differential between men and women is not a game. In addition, the probability of abuse is extremely high as we can see in the case of Mr. Jetton, the former Missouri Speaker of the House who rendered a woman’s ‘safe word’ useless by drugging her. As well, in the porn industry, many actresses cannot perform some of these acts without being on drugs which are freely dispensed by physicians from the area where these films are made. As for kink.com, a San Francisco torture pornography production company, a close friend of a woman who worked for kink until she became too traumatized had this to say: "People in this industry know the hush money they pay talent to shut the fuck up. I know quite a few girls that they’ve taken advantage of and felt the need to give them extra money after the fact. I’ve talked to producers, directors, and talent - the only people saying positive stuff about them are the ones making money off them".

Although, for a wife or girlfriend, I can imagine it could be enjoyable to engage in this kind of play if their man equally shared in housework and child rearing activities; then it would really be a game, in every sense of the word. There is even an online course in this genre that makes it all respectable. However, in my view, BDSM, is an example of the eroticization of the power differential between men and women and originated with the idea that sex is shameful (for women) and therefore ought to be painful. This can be observed in the biblical legacy of sexual violence in the virgin martyr stories of medieval pornography. Although in early martyr legends the emphasis is on the almost superhuman endurance of pain, later versions of the same legends offer a heightened emphasis on sexual torture of the victim, especially torture of the victim’s breasts. I can’t help but wonder if rape and BDSM fantasies would even have existed in a world in which gender equality had always been the norm. I doubt it.

That said, the march continues towards female sexuality that is driven by female agency and desire. Many new porn sites for women are sprouting up all over the Internet. I’ve noticed that a few have mimicked the style of main stream porn, that is, they offer ‘categories’. Although I must say, I am disappointed with the category, "degrading men" that I observed on one site. For someone interested in changing society, aiming for which of the two genders can degrade and exploit the other most simply exacerbates the problem rather than solves it.

Anyhow, it is believed that Internet porn helps women take control of their sexuality as they enjoy being able to pick and choose from a smorgasbord of porn, the kind of images that appeal to them while rejecting those they deem to be degrading and disturbing, of which there are plenty. But best of all, because porn watching is a private endeavour, the branding of women as sluts or whores for experimenting with and savouring their sexuality does not occur. Violet Blue, an expert on Internet porn, has even written a book entitled: "A Smart Girl’s guide to porn". Unfortunately however, on her website, images of sexy women still predominate. Also, strangely, she provides a link to Cinema Erotique, a film company that, although the director of its movies is female, claims to show the best erotic critically acclaimed films with beautiful girls having sex. Violet Blue offers the perfect example of how even sexually liberal-minded women continue to have difficulty extracting themselves completely from the influence of the omnipresent male gaze. Because of the primacy of the male gaze, what is believed to be sexy to straight men gets defined as “sexy” for everyone.

But then there is Petra Joy, a German award-winning erotic photographer and filmmaker, who is unique in that she actively explores the essence of authentic female sexual agency. While she principally focuses on female pleasure, men often and inadvertently, derive pleasure as well since female sexual fantasies are not driven by humiliation of the male. In her films, which she describes as, ‘art-core’ rather than ‘hard-core’, she likes to show men as objects of female sexual desires as, she believes, "There is a distinct lack of pin up culture for women who enjoy looking at naked men." She also asserts that porn prides itself on being liberal and ground-breaking – yet the exploration of a straight guy’s arse is one of the biggest taboos in straight porn films. The term for this sexual practice is pegging and is the focus of the instructional DVD "Bend over Boyfriend" which has reached cult status. This practice was also discussed in the second issue of Filament Magazine which offered several websites for further information and instructions - "Take it like a man" approaches strap-on-sex as if it were an act of domination, but contains useful ‘how to’ advice. In addition, this man’s detailed description of his first experience with getting pegged is quite insightful. Finally, for the many guys who may feel squeamish about this, you do realize that the prostate is considered to be the male equivalent of the G spot in women and is best accessed via the anus. It would be a shame if, because of inhibitions, you would deprive yourself of a feeling of supreme ecstasy.

But let me refocus on Petra Joy and the art of pleasuring women. What makes her porn movies distinct from those in mainstream pornography is that nothing is faked; her motto is: "Feeling it, not faking it". When she puts out a casting call for a new project, she looks for amateurs who enjoy sharing their sensuality and discovering new erotic pleasures in front of the camera ......Petra consistently seeks men who enjoy being eye-candy for the girls, enjoy satisfying women rather than focusing only on their male pleasure. If you’re a woman, what’s not to like?

Petra's movies "Sexual Sushi", "Female Fantasies", and "Feeling it", aim to sexually inspire, excite and liberate women. The fantasies featured in the films vary greatly and go far beyond the cliché of "romance and roses", from being totally pampered by two men at once, or a whole group of people, to having sex with a stranger in a public place. Petra is always looking for new material and encourages women to share their sexual fantasies with her. Her latest film, the autobiographical documentary "The Joy of Porn" had its premiere at Berlin’s first European Porn Film Fest, October 24, where she won the "Feminist Porn Award".

While Petra Joy shares my personal views about porn as well as a love of art, there is an abundance of excellent female directors of women’s adult erotic movies that cater to the many different sexual tastes of women. For example, Candida Royalle combines explicit sex with humour in "Stud Hunters", a satirical film about the adult film industry. The plot involves a dozen guys who show up to audition for a role as a stud in a porn movie, but during the process, things spin hilariously out of control. Candida has produced an eclectic collection of porn movies that suit a variety of tastes. There is also Tristan Taormino, whose movie "Rough Sex" dares to challenge conventional wisdom about the fantasy lives of women. Although personally, even though most parts of the movie appeal to me, and while this movie has been ethically produced, I still feel conflicted about having fantasies shaped by male desires. It will probably take decades for male and female fantasies to fuse and morph into new kinds of sexual cravings that will, hopefully, exceedingly reflect an egalitarian society.

Equally popular are the films of Erika Lust as well as her book: "Good Porn: A woman’s guide." "The Good Girl" is the classic "pizza guy" porn flick revisited by Erika Lust, who added humour, passion, and a female perspective to this porn cliché. Erika explains what led her to focus on porn for women.

The first time I saw a porn film I had the same reaction that many women have – it was definitely not love at first site. I was aroused by some of the images, but there was so much that bothered me. I didn’t identify with any of it: neither my lifestyle, my values nor my sexuality was represented in any way. There was no sign of women enjoying themselves – it was as if they were simply there to please the men. The sexual situations seemed ridiculous: girl walks into room, discovers boyfriend with her best friend and instead of getting pissed off, she joins them! (Filament Magazine)

For more extensive and detailed information, Porn Movies for Women is an excellent website that steers women through the labyrinth of all things porn that is available to them on the Internet.

Finally, there clearly is a renewed energy for and excitement about exploring and validating authentic female sexuality. Women throughout the world have taken up the challenge and are eager to cast off the heavy cloak of thousands of years of sexual suppression. The first Petra Joy Awards of November 2009, in Berlin, received entries from all over the world. The special jury award went to Holland’s Cora Emens’ for "Cora’s Memoires – The Rose", a porn movie which the jury called a "Gutsy and charming film that celebrates ‘older’ women’s sexuality!" (Contrary to popular belief, middle-aged and older people enjoy sex, and will do so into their 80s, research suggests). A brief and subtle scene of pain and pleasure, which emanates from the gentle brushing of a thorny rose against naked skin, can be seen in a sample of clips from the winners. The joy of porn, indeed!

"The Night of the Senses" is an annual event where "Erotic Oscars" are handed out to creative talent. It celebrates diversity. The venue offers many different play rooms where people can live out their sexual fantasies. When Petra Joy attended one year she decided to be a voyeur. She narrates one of her most memorable experiences.

Another room, another world. I hear a woman's loud moans. They draw me in. Her moans are not high but she groans with pleasure almost like an animal. When I step into the room I see men, lots of men surrounding a kind of metal bed. All I see of the woman is her raised hips and pussy. She is being fingered slowly and deeply by just one guy and watched by all the others. The guy's eyes meet mine. He appreciates and enjoys being watched. This is so different from the group wank scenario of a "Bukkake" party. The guys are not here to degrade the woman. The guys watch a woman being pleasured. And they know they are lucky to witness this intimate moment - a glimpse into the world of infinite female sexual power. A woman receiving total pleasure without shame. She is not serving but being served. Pleasured by one man and adored by the others. To me it felt like a temple of worship to female lust. Deep wet and roaring. And a shiver goes down my spine. Source

Next: Mainstream Pornography