Longtime fellow women’s porn site Sssh.com is sponsoring a panel session on July 22 entitled “Women In Porn: Shattering The Myths“. The session will feature director Kelly Holland, director and performer Ashley Fires and MakeLoveNot Porn founder Cindy Gallop. It is a webcam-based panel that will be broadcast live on MindBrowse.com. According to Sssh, the aim of the session is to offer:
an interactive [four-person] panel discussion that pits prominent women working in the adult entertainment industry against some of porn’s harshest critics to debate the nature of the industry and women’s changing role in it.
Interestingly, the panel is being pitched as a “debate” but the organizers have a problem: they can’t find an anti-porn activist to attend. Organizer and moderator Dr. Chauntelle Tibbals writes
Yes – as of this moment, we have a four-person event scheduled with only three participants. (!!!!!)
We have a performer, an executive/producer, and a woman who rides an interesting cultural line between “real” sex and porn. BUT – as of right now, at this very moment, we cannot find an anti-porn person who will agree to participate. (!!!!!)
We’ve already invited all the big names – you know, the ones who plan anti-porn conferences, rally on college campuses, and speak endlessly to media about the how bad adult entertainment is. Declined. The event will be done completely via webcast, so it doesn’t involve travel (or even any shared airspace with porn people). Denied. We’ve reached out to organizations, activists, professors, former performers turned speakers, and even self-described recovering porn addicts. Thanks, but no thanks.
So then, how in the hell are we supposed to have a discussion that brings together a wide range of perspectives on porn when one of the most vocal positions – anti-pornography – refuses to engage?
Now I’ll admit, this is probably not the kind of thing an anti-porn activist would consider to be “friendly ground” – A panel of 3 mostly pro-porn people versus 1 anti-porn person at an event organized by a porn site. Nonetheless, this is exactly the problem when it comes to people who oppose porn. They refuse to speak to or engage with people on the ground in the porn industry. They don’t listen to any opposing voices; their “evidence” is usually cherry picked and backs up their pre-existing arguments. Women who happily work in porn and willing to speak out about it are non-conforming data to them.
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I make porn and I make a living from it. This doesn’t mean I’m going to blindly endorse every aspect of the porn industry. I know there are problems, I know it’s often sexist and derogatory. On this I can find some common ground with anti-porn people. But they will dismiss my opinion as being flawed by money (like they don’t make money of their activism), they’ll say I am deluded, not in possession of all the facts, that I’m living with a false consciousness, that I’m not a real feminist. And they’ll say this to performers and porn-studying academics alike.
If anti-porn feminists want to be taken seriously, they need to step up and engage. Otherwise, their arguments are just so much bullshit.
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Meanwhile, there’s been a few articles about feminist porn in the mainstream press lately. They all so pretty much the same thing so I’m just going to tack them on the end of this post.
Feminist porn: sex is about female pleasure too. The Independent profiles Annie Sprinkle and Madison Young. “So what’s the difference between the two worlds? ‘One’s an industry, one is a movement'”
Defining feminist porn: is that XXX flick organic? The Daily Beast asks the usual questions, interviews Madison and also talks to Chelsea Poe and Lily Cade, who recently had a shitfight on Twitter.
Can women in porn call themselves feminists? This appears to be a self-submitted article at All Voices and it gets Jiz Lee’s gender wrong, as well as posing a really stupid question in the headline. It’s written in response to…
Sex Tips From Feminist Porn Stars Will Change the Way You Think About Intimacy another Mic article which is well written.