A lot of “feminist porn” & associated rhetoric seems like a really good example of abuse of emotional labor. Recently I’ve...
A lot of “feminist porn” & associated rhetoric seems like a really good example of abuse of emotional labor.
Recently I’ve been reading a few things by and about Erika Lust:
Lust wants to show “real sex” and tells her actors to “take the porn” out of on-screen intercourse. She demonstrates the ludicrous poses people pull in porn: arched back, stuck-out chest, pursed lips. “I tell them ‘don’t have sex like a porn star, have sex as a person, as you do in your home’.
I don’t know about anyone else, but I would be really put off if an employer asked that of me. The part of my sexuality that I sell on camera is not the part that exists for me and my partners. They inform each other, yes, but ultimately the former is work, it’s a job, it’s art. It’s not my life. Not any more than any other theatrical production would be.
Almost all porn sells the “she’s thrilled to do this; she’s begging for it; she’d do it for free!” myth. But “feminist porn” seems uniquely intrusive in that it doesn’t just peddle the fantasy - it insists that it’s not a fantasy, that its performers aren’t truly enlightened or empowered if they admit that it’s just an acting gig to them.
It’s like…the difference between making sure your cashiers are smiling and bubbly and acting happy and insisting that they’d better actually be happy. The former I can ape, no problem. But the latter? No. I’ll act for you. That had better be enough, because you don’t get to demand access to my actual emotional state. I can pretend for you, but don’t fool yourself: it’s still a performance.
You have a point that that’s a thing that can happen, but I’m not sure that’s what she’s going for. I don’t think she’s necessarily saying it has to be YOUR authentic sexuality, just that it has to look like someone’s authentic sexuality.
Yes, there’s still an emotional labor component (as there is in all acting), but I do think it’s still expected to be acting (see the next paragraph down referencing characters).
I’ve never worked for Erika Lust, specifically, but that is absolutely what every “feminist porn” company I’ve ever shot for has wanted. Emotional, soul-baring authenticity. When workers speak up about this, or about how the director’s demands to perform a certain way are incompatible with their request for authentic sex, they get fired.
also i had to sign a form saying i wasn’t doing it for the money
“This McDonald’s job is yours…if you can prove you don’t actually need money and just really really love flipping burgers.”
the director’s demands to perform a certain way are incompatible with their request for authentic sex
Tell me more about this? I think I know what you mean, but I don’t want to put words in your mouth.
To give an example: I was given the directions “masturbate like you do at home, to a real orgasm” and also “lie on your back”. These things cannot possibly be accomplished simultaneously. And yet. Similarly, I was given the instruction to wear clothes that “expressed my personality and made me feel comfortable/relaxed”. I did - incidentally, an outfit I’ve worn both on camera and escorting. Upon arrival the same person who said that told me my attire was unacceptable and to change into an outfit from wardrobe which he picked out. It was not comfortable and the situation made me nervous, and a worse performer, and also less ~authentic. I think they would make better porn, and a better working environment, by just admitting it’s a fiction an optimizing for that.
Have you read Mikey Way’s article “Fuck Your Feminist Porn”? It gets at what we’re talking about here, and does it excellently to boot.
They had me sign a form in which I promised that filming for them was just a hobby, not my job. … [T]his company gets everyone so worked up about them supposedly being an ethical alternative to mainstream porn that nobody notices that they’re an international corporation paying next to nothing for people to style, shoot, produce, edit, and perform in their own work. It’s okay, though—it’s just a hobby!
tl;dr feminist porn is predicated on drawing lines between “regular women’s sexuality” and “pornified sexbots” (to quote Twisty Faster). It profits off sex workers’ labor while being terrified to admit that its employees are, in fact, sex workers. Because that would be gross and terrible.
Interesting. It’s curious how much the porn you describe echoes the ideas of anti-porn feminists like Dworkin and MacKinnon (particularly that sex for pay is inherently and obviously degrading) despite being nominally sex-positive, and clearly not anti-porn in the strict sense of the term.
This seems like a ‘serving two masters’ problem. A lot of amateur porn already fills one of the niches described above. Many people post naked pictures and video of themselves masturbating/having sex as a hobby, and they don’t need to sign a contract to know that’s what they’re doing. Presumably what the feminist porn offers above and beyond this is a level of professional polish (in terms of cinematic production values and actors/outfits/scenarios that the audience is more likely to see as attractive), but the thing is that “professional” by definition means it’s someone’s job. And while people enjoy their jobs to greatly varying extents, that’s at least as much a matter of remuneration and treatment by coworkers and bosses (as wanderingwhore and the Mikey Way article allude to) as it is of the quality of the work itself, let alone whether the work appears enjoyable to an outside observer.
In conclusion, a lot of this reminds me of the forms of internal discipline and panopticism described in Discipline and Punish, and that’s kind of creeping me out.
I think I know what you mean by your last bit, but can you elaborate?
This passage from traditional authoritarian power to modern totalitarianism can be precisely rendered through superego in an old joke of mine. Let’s say that you are a small child and one Sunday afternoon you have to do the boring duty of visiting your old senile grandmother. If you have a good old–fashioned authoritarian father, what will he tell you? “I don’t care how you feel, just go there and behave properly. Do your duty.” A modern permissive totalitarian father will tell you something else: “You know how much your grandmother would love to see you. But do go and visit her only if you really want to.” Now every idiot knows the catch. Beneath the appearance of this free choice there is an even more oppressive order. You seem to have a choice, but there is no choice, because the order is not only you must visit your grandmother, you must even enjoy it. If you don’t believe me, just try to say “I have a choice, I will not do it.” I promise your father will say “What did your grandmother ever do to you? Don’t you know how she loves you? How could you do this to her?”
– zizek
Is this necessarily about “feminist porn”, or even an ideologically-driven issue? It seems to be the adult industry as a whole that’s placing more emphasis on, I guess, the performance of enjoyment.
And on a scene-by-scene basis, did this trend ever present as feminist, in the sense of serving a cause? I don’t think the big pioneers - Beautiful Agony, Met-Art and the other ex-Warsaw ops, even fucking ALS - ever presented as such. At the most, Abby Winters was “we love women loving themselves a/o each other: so let’s monetize it!”
On a broader “who is a star” basis, again more character work - compared to Jenna Jameson, Sasha Grey had much more of an “average” body but was much better at performing enthusiasm, that’s a common theme of stardom these days. With the meteoric rise of James Deen and the fall of steroid woodsmen, even the men.
But what if that’s just a function of supply and demand? In the ‘70s and ‘80s “being willing to do porn” was a saleable attribute; as more people became open “willingness plus hotness” was the thing. Competing on that axis gave us plastic monsters - the pompadour of humans - and by this point where hot people are willing for free, talented sexual performance is the differentiating factor.
Also with the expansion of the industry with so much free content, from an economic perspective a lot of modern stars are effectively elite courtesans that use films as demo reels for escort bookings arranged over social media, that probably selects for skilled charismatics.