Porn made for women, by women

Lovely article - wanted to share and trade opinions? Is there really a difference in gender attributes towards porn? I am critical of that..would love to explore further discussions.
xox
Nina


http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandsty...en?INTCMP=SRCH


'Fem porn' director Erika Lust at work
Anna Arrowsmith (aka Anna Span) has been a porn director for 12 years. This made her recent campaign as the Liberal Democrat candidate for Gravesham rather controversial. "Not my cup of tea", said Nick Clegg about her occupation. But what she has been doing is not mainstream pornography, but independent porn made for women.

"I have fought long and hard for women's right to sexual expression and consumption, as well as for freedom of speech," she wrote in the Observer. But Gail Dines, author of Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality, challenged her in the Guardian: "What are you doing that is different from what every other pornographer is doing?"

The best way to answer that question is probably by watching Arrowsmith's films. And not just hers. Because a number of women, tired of mainstream porn and tired of criticising it without offering an alternative, are making the porn films they want to watch.

These films don't include horny schoolgirls, naughty nurses, nymphomaniac nannies or desperate housewives. Nor do they include Mafiosi, multimillionaires drinking cognac, pimps, drug dealers or super-sized sex machines. Because these women, as filmmakers and consumers, place themselves far away from mainstream porn.

"It is a prejudice to say that women don't like porn," says Erika Lust, another fem porn director. "Sex images make you hot, but pornography has been made by and for men. In mainstream porn everything is about male pleasure and women are objects. Oral sex for men can last forever, but when women's turn comes it lasts 10 seconds. Female orgasms are not an issue in most of the films. And women are shown mostly as prostitutes, which is sad."

Lust has directed three porn films and written three sex books. Her website explains: "We produce adult movies. We publish erotic books and magazines. Our works speak about sex, lust and passion. We enjoy exciting you and exciting your mind. We make love, not porn. And we do all this with a feminine, aesthetic and innovative approach."

After working for 10 years as a TV producer and director, Petra Joy has moved on to directing "art-core" films. She says: "Women have a lot of catching up to do. We had the sex toy revolution first - no more giant cucumbers but a gold-plated mini vibrator perfect for clit stimulation - and now the second wave is the porn revolution: porn that is made by and for women, that focuses on female pleasure and features male sex objects."

These directors are just three among many. Their films have different styles: Lust's are urban and modern, Joy's are visual and sensory and Arrowsmith's are a bit more hardcore. But there are similarities that show how this new branch of the porn industry works.

First of all, they are educated. Lust read political sciences at Lund University, Joy has a master's degree in film history at the University of Köln and Arrowsmith studied fine art at Central Saint Martins. They do this because they chose it, and not because they don't have other options. They are all independent producers and distribute their films mostly over the internet. They pay particular attention to aesthetics, music, locations, actors and stories. And most importantly, they think about what women need to enjoy porn.

Joy says: "Women enjoy seeing a curve of arousal and like to understand why these people are having sex and how they got turned on. Women want to see credible female performers, women of all sizes and looks who genuinely enjoy themselves rather than porn clones with fake nails, hairs and boobs faking it for the camera."

Lust adds: "To get excited women want to see something that looks like us. We want to see independent women exploring their sexuality, who are not afraid, but are not sex heroines either. We want to see attractive men who share our lifestyles, our ideas."

These directors make sure they only work with people who want to perform in erotic films, and that what you see is real pleasure. Lust says: "I want people with an open sexuality who want to work here. I don't want anybody doing this because they don't have another choice. During the shooting I want them to have good sex and it's my job to find the images. For me it is a tense moment, because things happen only once and it's a moment of hard work. Is not a party behind the camera."

In 2006, Alison Lee created the Feminist Porn Awards, which this year takes place on 13-15 April in Toronto. She says: "We wanted to celebrate people who were making porn in a feminist way and help to expose them to a greater audience. For our sixth anniversary we are expecting lots of stars and a super-fun event. We are also hoping to have a stronger focus on websites and online porn than we have in the past."

Lust, Joy and Span have previously won awards in different categories. This year Lust is nominated for her last film, Life, Love, Lust, and Span for Sex Experiments: Bisexual Scenes and Sex Interviews.

These director's films are also featured on Dusk!, the Dutch porn channel that since 2007 has broadcast fem porn 24/7 and is available to 1.2m viewers. Martijn Broersma says he started the channel with the aim of providing a service that nobody else was offering.

"Nowadays women talk more about their own [sexual] likes and dislikes," he said. "With this revolution in mind, it was logical that women needed their own erotic TV channel."

And while independent fem porn keeps growing, mainstream porn is in crisis. Patrick Kwasniewski specialised in gender and queer studies at the University of Klagenfurt and is currently researching his thesis on feminist porn. He says: "The development of this branch of the industry is profiting from the internet: the more direct ways to reach consumers, easier ways of self-distribution, having a more focused target and producing highly profiled films. Whilst the mainstream industry faces loss of profits through not changing their traditional ways of production or distribution and producing very repetitive films that have more and more troubles on the market, especially when there's so much for free on the internet."

Joy adds: "The industry is slowly waking up to the fact that it is not just VOD [Video on Demand] that caused the drop in porn DVD sales, but that even males are bored of films that always show the same performers in the same studios going through the same sexual positions in the same running order and looking bored whilst faking it. People are hungry for more authenticity, variety and joy."

Being part of this industry that refuses to change hasn't always been easy for female porn directors. Male members of the porn industry don't necessarily like their presence. Lust says: "Pornographers are usually middle-aged straight guys, with a similar cultural background. They don't like it when I say that I make porn for women. They say their porn is for everybody and I am the 'tight' one. But I just can't have an intellectual discussion with them, because they don't measure up. What I'm doing is criticising the kind of porn they have been making for years and offering an alternative."

There are no reliable figures on female porn audiences, but there are some academic studies that provide some information. Verena Chiara Kuckenberger is responsible for gender at the University of Graz, and she did a study on women's porn that included audience research.

She says: "Research suggests that women are not as interested in pornography as men are. But this assumption has to be seen in a broader context – there are certain scripts for male and female sexuality and one of these says that women don't find pleasure in looking as man do. But who looks and who gets looked at is a question of power as well. Historically the gaze is male, while women are objects that are being looked at.

"For women to admit to experiencing pleasure in watching pornography means overcoming stereotypes about female sexuality. There are women who do not want to consume pornography, but at the same time there is a potential female audience for porn and I would say it is bigger than it has been assumed so far and it is increasing as our society overcomes gendered stereotypes in general."

Keeping all this in mind, I asked Arrowsmith how she feels about the controversy about her work. She said: "I have received very good responses from the press, the readers and the general public. Now, I want to join together my political work and the work I do in the porn industry. I'm going to start campaigning for sex workers' rights and encouraging women to fight for what they deserve."

There's an adult toy store in Baltimore that caters primarily to women and tries to carry a good variety of porn geared towards women (directed by women, etc). I really think that niche of the industry is on the fast track to rapid expansion.

I know some of the female geared ones are created with more of a romantic storyline. (Kind of like a romance novel I'm guessing.) I myself don't need a long drawn out storyline, but I also don't get much entertainment out of watching what look like porn chick clones faking it in a film.

I know the one director in the article said she wanted actresses who really wanted to be there. I'd be curious if her goal for the scene is for the actress to have authentic orgasms and if she films until that happens, or if she just aims for what appears to be more genuine responses. From this quote: "During the shooting I want them to have good sex and it's my job to find the images. For me it is a tense moment, because things happen only once and it's a moment of hard work." ...it appears as though she really strives to capture the real thing.

I've met a lot of women who watch porn but would never admit it to husbands or boyfriends, so I think there's definite validity to the statement that the real numbers are hard to pinpoint.

I have a few female friends who really have no interest in women, but who gravitate towards more lesbian porn, simply because they say the reactions were more authentic and they weren't so agressively manhandled. One of them in paricular would probably buy every romantically driven porn that director creates

With everyone and their mother having access to create videos and flooding the male market, you'd think the big companies would welcome the opportunity to break into a new market and would actively recruit the highly skilled female directors to help them achieve that.

There is a similar store in Toronto that caters to women.

As for porn: try and find some of the films that Candide Royale directed; they date from the late 1970s or early 1980s.

I've always liked the porn directed at women more than the crass "suck my cock, now roll over and I'll fuck you" "Oh shit; oh God; oh fuck; oh shit" on ad infinitum..... followed by the guy cummning on her face. Who the hell cums on a girls face except maybe numbnuts who watch to much porn and think that's the way it's done.

I've always liked the porn directed at women more than the crass "suck my cock, now roll over and I'll fuck you" "Oh shit; oh God; oh fuck; oh shit" on ad infinitum..... followed by the guy cummning on her face. Who the hell cums on a girls face except maybe numbnuts who watch to much porn and think that's the way it's done. Originally Posted by John Bull

oh gosh - how right you are-----my worst case scenario is clients trying to "get all rocco siffreddi" (the stupid position where you doggy style a woman with one leg kneeing and one standing ) which hurts like a PIA if you are tight, because the jerks don`t understand that this is a PORN pose for the camera, but think its because a woman needs it that way. Anyway - if i look at some girls face i can`t seem to see any fun.

I like stylish porn with a little story line. Like Mario Salieri Porn (good old italian porn) the Vivid Productions and Michael Nin.

More later gotta go

I'm a huge fan of Andrew Blake! His work is sexy and female-friendly without being awkwardly PC, in my opinion.

It's hard to make generalizations about what kind of porn the different genders prefer, but I personally find a lot of mainstream stuff degrading and unappealing in that it focuses almost exclusively on male pleasure and shows women enjoying certain acts much, much more than I believe the average woman really does. I can't say the rough and degrading stuff is never fun to watch, but I'd love to see more depictions of how sex is for real people. So much hotter to me!

Who the hell cums on a girls face except maybe numbnuts who watch to much porn and think that's the way it's done. Originally Posted by John Bull

You would be surprised..some of us actually like that!

I look at porn as just a means to the end..I watch it to get horny,then I play with myself and get off. I do not want a storyline. I do not care why they are doing it. I do not need to know the level of intelligent input that when into the directing of the scene. I always skip to the part when they are fucking anyway. I like dick and I want to watch a woman taking that dick nice and hard. I also like to watch a man cum..so I do not find that cheesy when the man gets off and cums all over the woman. I like to watch the man enjoy himself. Big turn on for me. I like women but cannot stand lesbo porn. I have to have a real cock in there. I could care less who directs it.

Lesbian porn is NOT good in general and I like the idea of a woman directing it because the one's I have seen I just was laughing so hard (because of how far away from the real it is) I couldn't watch and get off with it.

Now if they were being all porn star like with a man in the room that changes the dynamics and interest. . . .

x-art.com

I'm a huge fan of Andrew Blake! His work is sexy and female-friendly without being awkwardly PC, in my opinion.
Originally Posted by Natalie

Oh yes Andrew Blake is on my list too! He is great! Love him! I love Janine Lindemulder. She is one of my favourites (she only did lesbian porn - except for one movie where she did a porn with men - like pirates of the carribean). She is hot, kinky, not too soft , but never degrading, And i simply and plain love her face! She has such a hot expressive face! Do you know her?

Oh yes Andrew Blake is on my list too! He is great! Love him! I love Janine Lindemulder. She is one of my favourites (she only did lesbian porn - except for one movie where she did a porn with men - like pirates of the carribean). She is hot, kinky, not too soft , but never degrading, And i simply and plain love her face! She has such a hot expressive face! Do you know her? Originally Posted by ninasastri

I don't, but I will check her out. Thanks for the recommendation!

Natalie:

http://www.iafd.com/person.rme/perfi...r=f/janine.htm

For anyone that remembers Debauchette (Kendall) wasn't she joining with a group of women to do more female friendly and appealing erotica? If I recall correctly they were going to cover photography, writing and I think porn.....

C x

Camille, she was; now if I could only remember the website