A Rare Feminist Post; Porn, Perception, Framing. Part 1.

I started writing this post when I should have been writing several other things much more important (Such as a reply to you Chris about that email, which is on it's way - in summary, totally great idea!) but instead got lost writing a long diatribe about all the thoughts that a Guardian article gave me. But then it turned out I'd been writing all night, ruining my only just fixed sleep pattern might I add, and I hadn't even gotten about half way through what I wanted to say even though I'd hit the 4000 word mark. All stream of consciousness as well.

So I thought I'd better break it down and introduce it as a new blog theme to be regularly added to every week or so. I guess I should leave this until next week because calling it Masturbation Monday would probably make the most sense, but since it's not a Monday, let's just call it my Rolling Porn post.

Yes, porn: I will be writing about porn. Sometimes just about porn there out in the world, sometimes about how Ant has been involved in making porn, and how I almost got involved but never crossed that line cos it was never quite right, sometimes about the philosophical perspectives people argue over, sometimes just plain old criticism, and stuff like that. I am welcome to any and all arguments of any kind, and anyone's own experiences.

First let's start small; let's us begin:

*Disclaimer: these porn posts will be my perspective, some of them will rank as my least objective posts of all time. It's about my own experience, opinion and philosophy. It's not an angry rant, but it's detailed: I strongly advise not to read if the reader has NO interest in porn, and to pause if they strongly feel they don't have any curiousity about what I know of it, and what I think about the people and things I've gotten to know about*

So I was taking a rare look at The Guardian, which used to be the only source of accurate news I trusted, but which for years has been, well... a load of blah? The Guardian has gone to the dogs and I haven't read it in a while. The past couple of days I've been checking in though, spurred on by my utter horror at the 'interactive' type page they set up for any old fucking idiot to write in what they thought the strategy should be for fixing the crazy rod problem in Japan, whether you've any professional knowledge of structural damage, science, containment or, hell, whether you've ever even seen a specialised energy building in real life or not. I expect that sort of thing on crappy morning discussion shows, desperate to fill a lot of their time on air with anything unscripted, even the public talking a load of old bollocks. Not on the Guardian. Since that imbued me with a sense of personal horror much like watching a car crash, I find myself going back. 

And today I saw this: Porn Made By Women For Women.

Now as of writing up to this paragraph, I have not read more than the first five paragraphs of the article. I will read the rest, but even from the beginning I feel confident in assuming that to some extent I will have little faith in the rest. Why would I have little confidence in a huge article based on the first couple of paragraphs? [Edit: have now read all of article, and tis fine about the other people most of whom have a bit of knowledge of and they seem ok, but the following comments about Span I still stick by]

Because I personally know the framing of a statement in those paragraphs is inaccurate. About the stuff in it that I don't have firsthand experience with, I already have a reason to not be sure the rest is accurate and well researched when the statement in the beginning doesn't seem to have been.

What I refer to is the absolutist statement about Anna Span: 'But what she has been doing is not mainstream pornography, but independent porn made for women'. The article then goes on for the next paragraph to say that others have argued against this, and then the writer notes the best way to find out how she is different is probably best done by watching her films.

Watch her films ay? That's how to see how her work is different? Has the writer watched them?!

Now let's get something straight at this point: I haven't seen any of Anna Span's work produced in the last few years. But I don't think that should weaken my point since the comments about Anna Span don't state that there's been a change in direction for her, the statements are quite clearly referring to her career, not a progressive change therein. This is the sort of framing of someone, the lazy sentence designed to have confident punch in as few words as possible, that the statement makes a clear point, even if that point would have more veracity if you took into account the different perspectives. Saying that you'll find out how she is different if you watch her films is a suggestion that if you watch them and don't see how they are different from mainstream, you're the one missing something in your perception, not the films in their content. If a random reader of this article then went off and got some of her older films, said reader could be forgiven for thinking it's themselves that need to think about what's wrong with their own brains because it doesn't seem all that alternative at all. Framing like that just to simplify the context of the article really irritates me in itself.

So to my perspective: Anna Span is not a feminist pornographer. I'm 90% confident that if I watched her newer work I'd still think that, but I'm willing to consider her work has contextually improved since I last saw it. I'm 100% sure that she wasn't years ago though. 

Any statement that suggests she was always making porn for women, and in that sense 'alternative' porn is blatantly badly researched. Or the writer of the article finds the type of mainstream work Span has produced in her career generally to be to her tastes and she feels like advocating for it which is even worse – as a journalist she should set aside whether she finds the depictions erotic and do a bit of research into whether other woman feel represented and catered to by Span more than any other mainstream film. She apparently hasn't checked this, instead choosing to just reference an argument between Gail Dines and Span. In which, funnily enough both of them sound wrong by the very nature of them taking extreme views with no acknowledgement of the middle ground they refuse to talk about. Dines, with her comments about not being able to change something like this predatory capitalist system come off more as fatalistic than considered. For one thing, such statements seem to willfully ignore the history of capitalism, in the sense that in the history of capitalism often a market is invisible until someone starts to tap into it, proving to other naysaying companies that refused to tap the market, that they will lose marketshare if they do not move into this ripe area of supply and demand, an area that often balloons as the possibilities start to seem limitless once you analyse the new buying group. At one point women were not marketed to regarding general lifestyle products, but to a degree it was companies through trying to mine different areas from each other that proved to each other that targeting the specifics of what women want would bring out more obvious ideas of what they want. The same with children, changing attitudes towards making different types of products wouldn't exist it there hadn't come a time when marketing to them became a visible idea, before it had become obvious that children and their relationships with their parents and their parents' relationship with representing their lifestyle and social group to the world around them. Dine's suggestion that trying to change an industry from the inside out by proving mainstream brands need to mine something that they didn't want to admit existed, flies in the face of the whole history of marketing consumer products. Would she say the same of eco friendly and fairtrade homewares and clothing retailers marketing themselves as an alternative to the shops that only think about sustainability as a sideline or who don't at all? Taking away another market by giving people exactly what they want instead of making them compromise by buying something from a big chain that only slightly fits their wants and needs is a notorious way of changing the minds of the larger industry by proving the compromising customers will make a financial difference to their profits if they have somewhere else to leave them for.

Anyway, back to the point of Anna Span and why I think she didn't come off much better. It might be skimming through your head that maybe I have no reason to think I'm in a position to think I have evidence on my side. And sure, I don't have a mountain of experience with her, I've never worked as a porn star in one of Span's films. But I know a damn sight more than a lot of people who would tell me how they know she and so many others are feminist pornographers without any personal knowledge of the industry beyond 'faving' some pornographer they like.

My main reason? A slightly biased one based on some films she made and a film she was planning on making.

I found out about a job she was advertising for, I had an interview with her, she gave me some discs of her work for me to see that she thought she could proudly give me as evidence that she was different (which in the interview is what I said I wanted to do, something more intelligent, different, fresh). I watched the films she gave me. And they were not any different from anything I knew to be marketed as normal, male focussed porn. 

I'll go into that in more detail in a second, but first let me explain the circumstance: This was the time when Ant and I were more intimate knowledgeable of the porn world than just getting that DVD sent to your house and closely watching your bank statements to check that the name of the company really does look as innocent as the website said it would. During that year Ant filmed and edited some stuff, some I thought was on the ok scale, some I had a strong reaction to enough to throw the computer out the window, as did the cat - she tended to sit on his keyboard judging him if a certain number of hours of editing past. My involvement was mostly writing a bunch of different synopsi and treatments for different purposes, given that more intelligent, narratively feminist porn was what I was interested in. A feministic filmmaking process is great on its own too (as in, where the filmmaking process was very feminist but the content didn't break ground), but ingraining it in the narrative was what I was interested in.

One of those treatments was for Anna Span. She put an ad out around the web that she was looking to produce a porn movie made up of several short porn segments each one made by a different new female pornographer. It was a project specifically for finding and giving a platform to women getting into the industry. I applied and got the interview with her, where we had a very nice chat. During our conversation we discussed how I was interested in doing, you know - something different, something more realistic than a lot of what is out there, something more intelligent. She suggested that's what she was all about, and gave me some examples. Such as how having a set where just the pornstars are there is unrealistic, how like, if a set is supposed to be an office, so many other filmmakers won't have any extras, any suggestion that the office is populated. I agreed even though it wasn't entirely what I was getting at. I admitted at one point that I hadn't had a chance to see a lot of her work, so she gave me some DVDs to the films she had specifically talked about in our chat, and she gave me details of the budget, my responsibilities as the filmmaker and producer of my segment etc. She was nice, I went on my way pondering whether we were actually interested in the same sort of thing.

I got home and watched the films, and regardless of how nice she was as a person I didn't like her work. Few examples: the film where there are 'realistic extras'? One is about an assistant to the boss who get's done on a pool table by the boss himself and some other guy who had really bad, flaky skin on his skins (and his part of the position they all were involved in made it hard to not notice this :p ). The realistic extras were just some random people sitting down in the seating around right in front of the snooker game they weren't having, even though we aren't talking about another close room but right next to them in a medium sized room, they act like they don't notice and have a bit of a chat, if I remember correctly..  Another film I thought was quite fabulous was about a woman taking this guy back to her place sometime in the day, she makes him baked beans on toast and then they fuck, pretty standard pron fare, then she tells him she wants him to come on her tits in a northern accent and he does, pretty much end scene.

Those are the ones that stuck in my head. Anyhoo, I didn't class anything I saw as reflecting what I thought we had been discussing.. At this point me n Ant had had enough experiences with people who say you'll get to do something with positive messages, good production values, a more enjoyable narrative and better sex, and then you realise they've set in motion a production that's just the same as all that other shit and your name is definitely on it and there's nothing you can do about it now. So I told Ant I actually really didn't want to write one of my good but normal ideas for the treatment, cos I had a strong feeling if she picked it to go into production and it was even slightly tweakable into a mainstream thing, I'd end up with my name on something that had nothing to do with what I was hoping for. 

So I opted to write the most satirical porn idea I'd had up to that point: My treatment was called 'The Censors', and it was referencing generally both the British and American certification boards, and specifically a few individual cases that hardcore report readers would spot a mile away but general viewers wouldn't even know existed. The point basically was the in joke amongst certain porn centric groups that anything genuinely erotic, porn that is fantastically tantalisingly good for both women and men, would be watched and thoroughly enjoyed by the censors themselves, but then their decision report would order that all the good stuff was too much for the public and had to be censored. [FWI, the British board are actually quite reasonable but at the time there was some contention over films that showed female pleasure which had been given no rating, but in general I was more poking fun at the American board, about which there was a lot more comedy rumours and fodder about the extent to which a certain amount of bias and hypocrisy seems to come into play when they rate highly explicit male focussed stuff vs less explicit female focused stuff]

The narrative itself was that a couple of guys are sat watching a porn movie they are assessing, really blandly analysing each scene, then they discuss how good something just was or is, call in some secretaries and they all start going at it. I wanted the guys to seem just like the porn archetype, bland, expressionless (actually I wanted even more robotic than more porn actors who try but fail to sound really stimulated; I wanted them to seem dead inside), giving basic orders and moving lacklustrely from one position to another. They all finish, the women leave, the men discuss how all of that has to be cut from the movie, and then we move to the women outside casually discussing how crap the guys were, about humouring them, fragile egos, job description etc.

And that was the misogynistic version! Of course if I was making this off my own back I'd go outright weird and it wouldn't be women humoring the men for any reason. At the time I was really into sneaking the message in the backdoor (no pun intended), and I actually loved the idea of filming stuff that was very similar to what is mainstream (like men instigating sex with supposedly passive sex vessel female staff) but mixing it up with some other messages that kind of ruined the usual meaning. And obviously I enjoyed the idea that if it got made it would have to be assessed by the very people I'd taken the piss out of. And the British Board probably would have laughed too. But I wrote it as if the sex scene in front of sex scene would be fairly mainstream looking, just like her DVDs.

In all honesty, I picked that to submit to Span because I consciously figured... well, there's no way anyone can enter into production with this and then somewhere down the line, probably on the first day of the shoot, act like they thought something completely mainstream was going to be the dumb story. And I guess I also thought, if she did like it and commission it maybe she really is different and was looking for stuff like this all along, or at least really wanted to support all different women's perspectives on porn, not just the mainstream stuff she claimed she was being alternative by making.

Of course she didn't want to make it, and she very gently gave me the news. I was fine with that precisely because I only wanted to make stuff where we really were making the films we originally discussed, not some horrifying bastardised version because it seems easier to go with the flow once the agreements have been made. Where Ant ended up, it was kind of like starting your career thinking the job you're entering into is going to be the next Blow Up, and instead you find you're working on an Uwe Boll movie.

That's one thing I learned about being passive about it in the industry. It's not that everyone is going out of their way to be unimaginative, both narratively and cinematically. A lot of people start out discussing stuff that is no more difficult to make financially with a good perspective on men and women and sex than it does with the same old stereotypes. In a lot of cases the person or people actually making the thing (physically I mean, cameras, bodies, lube oh my) can find they are being told they have to shoot something completely normal with no colourful character or story edges because the idea of even one customer being turned off by, you know, artistic flourishes and enjoyable characters makes them bounce off the fucking walls. Even though it doesn't cost more, they picture that archetypal customer who doesn't buy because it's got stuff that might engage that side of the brain that you save for normal culture but you don't want anywhere near porn: that thoughful, engaged, quality checking side of your brain. 

I only wanted to start some kind of film if it was with people who I was sure were going to leave it alone, weirdness and all. Or like Anna Span, not even pretend they like it, not starting production with you sneakily thinking they can chip away at you to make it more basic. I appreciated Anna Span not even pretending she wanted to delve into that sort of odd, offputting stuff, but still that doesn't make her a feminist in my book.

Next Time: Why I think the porn industry is exactly the same as any other industry, so proper regulation of crime within it is the only real issue at hand...