[The Pro Circuit] Feminist Porn: No Categories?
If you’re reading this (and how could you not?) then you may already be familiar with the Feminist Porn Awards, sponsored by Toronto feminist sex shop Good For Her. Several Blowfish productions have brought Awards home to San Francisco in previous years. The 2009 awards have just been announced. There are forty-six nominees, viewable on the Good For Her website. On the list, you’ll see some familiar names, including nominations for The Crash Pad Series 3, Bride of Sin, Barcelona Sex Project and Champion. Hooray!
But there’s a controversial choice the Awards made this year that has me puzzling, and kind of excited to be of two minds. The criteria for nomination for a Feminist Porn Award are as follows, as enumerated on the Good For Her website:
1) A woman had a hand in the production, writing, direction, etc. of the work.
2) It depicts genuine female pleasure
3) It expands the boundaries of sexual representation on film and challenges stereotypes that are often found in mainstream porn.
And of course, it has to be hot!
Every part of this I can get behind; the Feminist Porn Awards are an audacious, industry-changing enterprise, as evidenced by the coverage they’re already getting in the adult press this year. In a time when the porn industry is reshuffling its deck and having to reinvent itself to stay viable, now’s the time for those of us who give a fuck about quality and diversity to stand tall for not only feminist pornographers, but for everyone who likes hot, audacious porn that ain’t the same old shit.
More importantly, from a consumer perspective, the Feminist Porn Awards have consistently honored quality work by independent artists who are changing the field. So don’t mistake my onrushing puzzlement as disregard for what the awards are doing: on the contrary, I think they’re among the most important developments in the porn industry in the last five years.
But this year they’ve both confused and invigorated me, because that big long list of 46 nominees is not divided by category. It’s all just . . . a big long list, one title after the other. Alphabetical, by director first name.
Why’d they make this choice? Says the site: “The Feminist Porn Awards have not separated films according to category, so we can let each film shine on its own merit.” That’s right — no more “Hottest Dyke Sex Scene,” which The Crash Pad took home in 2005, no more “Best Dyke Scene,” which Superfreak nabbed in ‘07; no more “Best Trans Sex Scene,” awarded to In Search of the Wild Kingdom in 2007, or “Hottest Kink Film,” which Bondage Boob Tube got in 2008.
No categories at all! Just a big fat pile of porn, all mingling together in a puppy-pile. I’m utterly floored — blown away. I don’t know what to think. Enriched or outraged? Both, and neither. I have no fucking idea. It’s a dangerous choice that’s got me genuinely confused about where I stand, something that rarely happens in porn.
Clearly one of the things that makes “feminist porn” important is that it breaks down existing categories — between gay and straight, male and female, trans and cisgender, et cetera. But no categories at all? Chemistry 4 right up there “competing” against Doing It Ourselves: The Trans Women Porn Project? I’ll confess that has me simultaneously invigorated and freaked out.
I’ve had this conversation in relation to the Oscars, where, for instance, documentaries don’t win Best Picture even though they theoretically could. The market is dominated by “fiction” films. If documentaries didn’t have their own categories at the Oscars, they would never win anything. The documentary categories guarantee that productions in that category receive fair consideration against others of their same type, rather than having to compete against profoundly different films that are guaranteed to always get more attention.
Similarly, with the Feminist Porn Awards while I am fascinated by the decision not to slice and dice feminist porn productions into categories, I have to ask whether it makes sense to compare, for instance, feminist trans porn to feminist dyke porn to feminist straight porn. Can you really draw conclusions about what’s hot based on no criteria other than it being hot?
On the other hand, isn’t that the ideal for any boundary-defying erotica? Doesn’t “feminist porn” demand that one be willing to set aside pre-assigned categories and re-imagine not only sex and gender but the very concept of pleasure? Doesn’t it make sense to look at a BDSM instructional video alongside a straight-ahead in-out fuck flick?
I’m gonna be honest here: I have no fucking idea. I am utterly confounded. I can’t decide whether I think this is brilliance or lunacy.
What do you think? When it comes to feminist porn — Categories, or no categories? Leave your thoughts in the comments, and please make them candid!
This entry was posted on Tuesday, 31 March 2009 at 2:38 pm and is filed under Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
on Tuesday, 31 March 2009 at 5:14 pm Courtney Trouble wrote:
As one of the nominees I can say that I am also a confused and invigorated mess, but yet - I don’t know what category my film would even fall under and so in a sense, I think I can understand what they are trying to accomplish. Perhaps they are trying to say that a small film like mine could be on par with something like Chemistry, that things like production costs, talent budgets, and the size of your camera don’t have anything to do with making a “feminist” porn? Or, perhaps what they are trying to do is something like what I’ve done with my porn site - throwing the dykes in with the fags, the Evan Stones in with the Syd Blakoviches, the Tobi Hill-Meyers with the Tristan Taorminos - and challenging audiences to see the arousal factor in each of these as equal? In a way you could close your eyes and pick a title and you would really have no idea what you were about to get - and I think there’s something politically radical about asking your audience to take that chance!
I’m excited to go out there and see how it all pans out. Maybe the whole adult industry will be rattled by the FPA’s niche-killing tactics. It’s a “genrecide!!”
on Thursday, 2 April 2009 at 9:48 am Feminist Porn Awards « Skid Roche wrote:
[…] My new column at Blowfish considers whether it makes sense for the Feminist Porn Awards to have completely dispensed with categories this year (read the whole thing here!) — an excerpt: […]