I’m pleased to say that Bright Desire has been included in an FHM UK article about “Girlfriend-Friendly Porn”. This piece asked two women, spanking porn queen Pandora Blake and journalist Lucy Hancock to give their opinion of four different adult sites, all of which have been labelled “female friendly”. Bright Desire is one of them – thanks to Pandora for suggesting it! The other sites are X-Art, The Art of Blowjob and I Feel Myself.
Overall, Bright Desire scored a B+ behind the A given to X-Art. Not bad. There’s lots that could be said about all of these sites and this article barely skims the surface but I feel pleased with the publicity, if nothing else. And I think it gives a decent idea of what BD is about: positive porn, realistic sex, real-life couples. Yes, my porn is a bit amateur but I can’t compete with big money glamour sites like X Art so I can only do my best.
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Pandora, who runs the amazing feminist site Dreams of Spanking, has given a more thorough rundown of her FHM porn-reviewing experience in this post.
A couple of quotes (the first cherry-picked because it makes me look good)
We both valued real desire and reactions, especially from female performers – real couples, real lust and real orgasms were definitely preferable to phoney-sounding moans, and we tended to agree whether something felt “real”. Bright Desire was good in this respect…
…We didn’t only want to look at the women. I Feel Myself didn’t seem to have a single male performer. The Art of Blowjob and X-Art were both in the habit of cropping the man’s face, or not showing anything other than his cock, while the camera lingered exclusively on the woman’s curves, face, eyes – practically the definition of male gaze. GirlontheNet has written a fantastic post on this trend, and it was disappointing to see it repeated in porn marketed as “for women”. We both commented that we wanted to see fit male bodies, the faces of both partners, and mutual interplay.
I really applaud this second point. The ongoing issue of the default male gaze in porn isn’t discussed enough. Ideally if you want to create porn for couples to watch together, it shouldn’t just be the same old porn that’s a little less sexist or offensive. It should take the desires and perspectives of both partners into account and acknowledge that, yes, women do want to admire men in porn, they do want to see the woman have an orgasm, they do want the focus to be on both partners, not just the woman.
One of the interesting things discussed was how both reviewers preferred their films to have a plot and that was missing in all of the websites. Speaking for myself, I like the idea of an occasional plot in porn but logistically I find it to be difficult. I’m really aware of how bad acting can be in porn; I think I’d rather dispense with it or do without dialogue rather than attempt plot and then have it look awful or clunky. So that’s why I’ve mostly done gonzo so far (the big exceptions are What He Left Behind and also I.M. In Love which is the prelude to Aeryn and Theo’s scene). My feature film has a plot but I’ve still got 3 scenes to organize and film for it so it’s a way off.
I’m glad FHM has done this article but I guess I should point out the obvious – the sample size of 2 women is really small and the four sites reviewed are only a taste of the variety of feminist and female friendly porn that’s out there. Still, it’s nice to have a men’s magazine acknowledge its existence!
The February issue of FHM is available in hard copy in the UK and you can also subscribe online.