The Virtues of Watching Feminist Porn With Strangers

Last week, while sitting in an auditorium full of people, I willed myself to not get turned on as I watched a clip from Anna Brownfield’s The Band.

Somehow, I’d made it this far in life without ever watching porn in an auditorium packed with strangers. Instead, porn is usually relegated to my private browser history and my own weird internal shame.

I often found myself cross-legged and furiously blushing when I attended the Feminist Porn Mini-Conference last week at University of California, Santa Barbara. The conference was celebrating the release of The Feminist Porn Book, a collaboration between three USCB professors (Constance Penley, Mireille Miller-Young, and Celine Parrenas Shimizu) and sex educator, author, and feminist porn director Tristan Taormino. The book contains essays on feminist porn from both academics and individuals working within the industry and is reviewed in Bitch’s current issue.

But what precisely is feminist porn?  Its definition is multifaceted, taking into account working conditions, representations of sexuality, varied body types and—above all else—challenging the dominant porn narrative. Read Taormino’s much longer discussion of the definition of feminist porn here. Much like its definition, feminist porn is a conversation that needs many voices, including journalists, academics, and the people who are actually doing this work.

I attended with a friend who writes about porn and sexuality—both topics that are not remotely my area of expertise.  But as a former academic, I was sold upon hearing “feminist conference.” One of my main reasons for not continuing to pursue an academic career was my continued frustration with the ivory tower. Many academics (feminist and otherwise) that I had encountered in school had brilliant, heady ideas about social change or sharp, biting cultural commentary but no way to filter it to a mass audience. I would attend conferences and listen to presentations while angrily scrawling response comments about class and accessibility in my notebook. Then I would go home and rant about the insular academic community and their seeming inability to engage anyone else.

So I was both slightly nervous and reluctant to attend the Feminist Porn Mini-Con. But I have never attended a conference where the discourse was as intent upon engaging and educating its audience. Throughout the opening panel discussion on the book and its importance and the closing clip show “The Feminist Porn Show” (porn clips curated by Taormino, grouped into categories such as Ladies First, Queer Factor and Dangerously Diverse) several concepts continued to come up that made me think about the concrete realities of my relationship with my sexuality, my body, and porn.

The discussions kept falling back to the politics of desire, which are intricately tied to porn and porn consumption, consent, and feminist politics. One statement for me particularly stood out when Taormino and company were discussing the idea of what you should like sexually versus what you actually do like. That’s a personal conflict that I’ve been having myself recently.

I’ve always had a fraught relationship with my body; my stomach has never been flat enough nor my nose small enough. And that personal loathing about my appearance has most certainly affected my sexuality.  Being naked was a huge ordeal. And being naked with another person? Forget about it.  At some points in my life, talking about sex has been a panic-inducing experience. Discussing what I want sexually mainly leads to terror: instead of admitting what I like, I’d just accept what I’m supposed to like. Recently, it just became exhausting being so uncomfortable with my body all the time, never being in the moment during sex, and not asking for the things I want because it didn’t fit with my pre-composed sexual script.

I’ve began trying to change things and, as with any change, it hasn’t happened overnight. Having great sex and finally being able to explore what I like and don’t like sexually has been a big part of making myself feel better about my body the way it is.

The best part about feeling better about sex is being able to feel better about talking about sex, whether it’s with a partner or a room full of strangers while I awkwardly cross my knees. The conference was a place for open, honest and respectful dialogue about the world’s most intimate issues, all of which made me examine my own relationship to sex and consuming porn.

As a culture, we have a pretty fucked-up relationship to sex. The conversations at the Feminist Porn Mini-Con and that are started by the Feminist Porn Book are so important because we need to talk about feminist approaches to porn, consent and sex on a societal level and a personal one. These conversations are the ones that will reinvent the ways that we see and critically explore sexuality and porn.  

Plus, we’ll all have better sex. And who doesn’t want that?

Listen to an interview with Feminist Porn Book author Tristan Taormino on Bitch’s “Monogamy” podcast episode.