Progressions in Porn
by Julie MacManus
It used to be something a man hid from his wife or girlfriend, tucked away in places she rarely looked. It was something to feel ashamed about when caught viewing. People were warned they would become addicted, or begin to treat the women in their lives the same way actors did in old-style XXX-rated videos.But now, pornography of all sorts can be discussed in Hollywood movies like Zack and Miri Make a Porno, and no one really cares. Similarly, in 1999's American Pie, Shannon Elizabeth played a character named Nadia, whose casual enjoyment of Hustler and Playboy magazines didn't seem to shock audiences. Even ten years ago, people's attitude towards watching others have sex was changing.
Porn is becoming more acceptable to female audiences due to a wider variety and increased accessibility. Of course, pornography wouldn't have evolved in this way had it continued to portray woman in the same submissive roles it did in the 70s and 80s. Adult entertainment is involving women in newer and more creative ways.
Critics of pornography and the way it depicts the role of women have less and less of a foundation for their arguments. Since women have taken an active interest in finding out just what their partners are viewing behind closed doors and societal views of sexuality have become more relaxed, some women have gone from being cautious viewers or overexerted actresses, to taking on a role in producing. Entrepreneurs like Candida Royalle, Annie Sprinkle, Estelle Joseph, and Erika Lust have begun catering to female audiences, and the viewers are eating it up. As psychologists write more and more about the power of the human brain and its link to sexual arousal, women can more openly admit to being turned on by visual material. Increasingly, films produced by female pornographers have enhanced storylines and involve more romance-closer to an explicit Harlequin romance novel than close-ups of men climaxing.
Meanwhile, sexual therapy books written by female authors help to perpetuate the pornographic melting pot by suggesting women turn to specific types of porn to help percolate a dried up sex drive.
Thanks to a few changes to the nature of the industry, "female-friendly" videos, directed by women, have become highly recommended by sexual therapists who encourage women to develop their sexual fantasies and seek inspiration from racy videos.
Some women, like Natalie Mitchell* (not her real name), a 27-year-old living in Nanaimo B.C., grew up curious about porn and eventually watched a video on her own one day. She says she enjoys watching pornography the most when she is by herself. "It's weird and doesn't turn me on at all when I'm watching it with friends," she says. "I've watched with partners too though, and that's good." When she joins a partner in watching porn, Mitchell says it's both partners who initiate the addition of porn into their foreplay, but she has met one or two guys who have felt weird about watching with their girlfriends. "I've suggested it with some and it's just never happened," she says.
Woman watching porn
Mitchell watches porn mainly because it's a turn-on. "I guess you could learn techniques too, but that is not really the reason I watch," she says. Porn appeals to her largely because she is attracted to women as well as men and likes to watch both figures in the videos, even though she doesn't have any interest in being with a girl in real life. "It's more of a fantasy," she says. "I prefer men."
Hearing comments from girls of the same age as Mitchell is a reminder of society shedding its sexual taboos. Pornography is a great place to begin cultivating fantasies and for most, it ends there.
Over the years, Mitchell says she has noticed more movies geared towards women and thinks the content seems more about the girls. She agrees that porn has become easier to find these days with so much being online. "I like it when they show her getting off too, not just him." Mitchell says she will sometimes skip the part when the male climaxes, since that is one of the least exciting elements of porn videos for her.
Janine Hunter, 23, recently suggested to her older boyfriend that they watch an adult video together. She was surprised to learn that he had never watched porn with his previous partner. He said it just wasn't necessary, or even an option. But Hunter, who is much younger than her 35-year-old boyfriend, and has done her research, knew where she could find suitable videos. She has grown up in a generation where sexual imagery abounds.
When pornography first hit mass markets, it seemed to cater to a male audience. Women in the videos were depicted as objects, servants, and whores. They were rarely caressed, barely enticed, and always suspected of over-dramatizing their enjoyment. Earlier pornography simply cut to the chase, cue the music.
Sandra Leiblum, Ph.D, a leading authority in sex therapy, and Judith Sachs, a health educator, co-wrote the book Getting the Sex You Want: A Woman's Guide to Becoming Proud, Passionate, and Pleased in Bed, in which they write that pornography "has classically been the province of men - a slimy, degrading, obscene, look at sex. The old hard-core porn films are a meaningless collection of crotch shots, huge penises entering tiny vulvas, breasts bigger than melons with nipples to match. No people, no plots - just disjointed sexual acts." They add that this traditional pornography "is not only not sexually stimulating to a lot of women, it can be repellent-since it implies that the female body is simply a collection of orifices to be used and abused."
But times have changed, and Leiblum and Sachs, both women who have surpassed middle-age, say female-oriented pornography can be used to waken a woman from sexual doldrums.
It helps that it's no longer necessary to spend huge bucks for enticing images. Partners either make their own sex tapes, Paris Hilton style, or log on to free websites or late night cable TV (Fridays Without Borders on Showcase, anyone?).
For all of these progressions of the pornography industry, we can largely thank Betty Dodson, a sexual therapist who has been writing about sex since the 1970s. Being one of the first women to openly write about masturbation, Dodson's work became an instant hit with women. Her book, Orgasms for Two, 2002, follows her highly successful 1987 Sex for One. But it's not until her 2002 publication that Dodson wrote about the benefits of onscreen pornography.
"Despite the efforts of the religious right to censor explicit sexual images, porno has become so much a part of American culture that it is being taught at the college level as a legitimate course," she writes. Of her own experience with erotic images, Dodson explains, "When I watched my first X-rated video, everything turned me on because sexual images were new." But Dodson quickly became bored of porn sooner than she was at all offended by it.
"My constant criticism of the heterosexual formula in most pornography interfered with my sexual arousal," she writes. Then, Dodson switched to watching gay male porn. "Looking at men's muscular bodies... was more interesting than watching a woman being passive while a man fucked her."
For women like Dodson who want to experience variety in their sex lives, porn now involves more combinations that cater to women. Scenes that involve group sex, lesbians, role-playing, fetishes, and increased amounts of foreplay supply a wider variety than the old school cookie cutter hetero vs. homo pornography and are geared to those females who admit their fascination with tantalizing images.
In an interview on her website, porn producer and entrepreneur, Candida Royalle answers where the demand for female friendly pornography has come from. "In the process of looking at whether adult movies were actually bad for society I concluded that sexually explicit art and movies were not necessarily bad and could in fact be informative and inspiring," she says. "It seemed to me that most porn was sex-negative and did not present a woman's point of view or show what women liked sexually. At the same time I could tell women were becoming more curious and felt permission to explore their sexuality due to the woman's movement of the late '60's, early '70's. With the advent of home video they had a safe place to look, but there was nothing out there for them. I also sensed that men wanted to share the experience of watching a sexy movie with their woman and again, there was little they felt comfortable bringing home to her. I saw a challenging new market that no one was payi ng attention to and I felt I would be a perfect person to provide content for it."
What followed from Royalle's informal market survey was the creation of Femme Productions, Inc. in 1984, a line of products that filled a much needed gap in the pornography industry.