What does an ethical porn company look like? A feminist porn company?
It should go without saying that an ethical company (regardless of their business) shows proper regard for the safety, health and well-being of its workers as a minimum. The details of what that looks like in porn are debated between and amongst health professionals and sex professionals, and when we through in BDSM kinks to the mix there are extra considerations about safety as well. I tend more nowadays to the "risk-aware consensual kink" acronym than the famous "Safe, Sane, Consensual" (if only because I prefer to replace the problematic word 'sane" with "competent"), but there is still a duty of care by the business towards its employees.
Consent also should be a given, but what does valid consent in a porn (or for that matter, BDSM) environment look like? It isn't just, "yes, I want to do this!" but should look a lot more like the standards require for medical research, where the term "informed consent" is used. This term is also common in sex-positive communities and kink communities to describe the threshold for valid consent.
I would expect an ethical porn company to want to be clear with a performer exactly what was going to happen to her in such a way that zie understands the risks (i.e. is risk-aware) and is able therefore to say that zie finds them to be acceptable risks for hir to take. One of the continued criticisms of Kink[Inc] over the "hymen-gate" issue (as it's now being called) is that the performer Nicki Blue appears not to have been given accurate information about the anatomy of the hymen or what happens to it when one has sex for the first time. This calls into question the quality of their preparation and informed consent standards.
These are all "care for the performer" issues that should be well enough known amongst sex-positive folks that I didn't need to reiterate them here (although for visitors not involved in sex-pos campaigning, it's a useful recap).
A lot of the debate around "hymen-gate" has been focussed on presentation, marketing and appearances, however. Given a company that functions ethically in respect to its employees, how does an ethical, or feminist, porn company present its works?
What kind of art do we expect a sex-positive porn company to produce?
A lot of the time, I like sex, and therefore porn, to be dark, sweaty and screaming. Other people have very different tastes. We can't call it "sex-positive" unless the art a porn company produces is allowed to cover the widest spectrum of styles and deeds (bearing in mind that to cover those deeds they must remain within the ethical constraints of looking after their performers properly, and maintaining informed consent).
One very important thing is to distinguish clearly between what is fantasy and what is reality. I have some very scary fantasies, including rape fantasies and women-in-peril fantasies where it's not always the case that the victim is rescued at the end. There is porn out there to cater for these fantasies. For instance, I have seen some very enjoyable quicksand porn where the implication in the scene is that the victim sinks without trace. However, the video also finishes with seeing the performers wash the muck of the "quicksand" from their bodies after the shoot - the fantasy was the quicksand "death", but the reality is that nobody died or was harmed, and everybody had a fun time.
Porn doesn't just show storyline/fantasy scenarios, however, and I also don't think it should be limited to those. Other types of porn might be called "roleplay on set" and "reality" porn. These both take place not in a scene depicting a story location, but in a set clearly intended to be simply a location for porn fucking to take place. Here there is less story and much more focus purely on the sex. The distinction between "roleplay-on-set" and "reality" is that in the first, after the performers are introduced, they adopt roles appropriate to the fetish. In what I'm calling "reality" porn they behave consistently throughout, acting as if they have decided off-camera to have sex, and then they "just happen" to have a camera focussed on the location where that sex is going to take place. If they are playing a role, they are in role before they appear on camera.
One of the reasons why Nicki Blue's vaginal virginity losing scene raised concerns is that, in terms of the particular fetish being portrayed, it was being presented as "reality" porn in the sense I've described here. Thus, while it may be about Ms Blue's fantasy of "breaking her hymen", that fantasy is being presented as reality. We are told not that we will see actors playing roles, but people doing something real. Since the fantasy that was being presented as real was based on false information about female anatomy, this seems to represent an unacceptable blurring of fantasy and reality.
So it's this "consistently-in-character" style of "just going for it" where I think that boundaries need to be laid. Where we have some clear signals that what we're seeing is make-believe (either because the performers only go into character after they've been introduced, or because there's a whole storyline to the scene) then the fantasy is clearly inside the "fantasy" box, and though the lines might be blurred, it's still distinct enough, and we can see where they are drawn. But where "reality" porn is involved, the observer is effectively inside the box with the performers, meaning that the viewer can't see the box clearly. It looks like it's really real.
When that happens, then I think sex-positive porn has to look like sex-positive sex: while the initial negotiation phase may have taken place off-camera, the sex that is on-camera should be of the "consent is sexy" variety. For example, if the man is going to call the woman a bitch, for example, then we need to see explicitly that that's what she wants him to call her. That may be in the advertising blurb, or it may be in the scene itself (e.g. as they're fucking, she tells him to call her a bitch). Essentially, for me at least, when I see a performer say "no" in that type of scene, I don't know if that's a roleplay "no" (and she has a safeword to use to stop the shoot if there's a real problem) or a real "no" (and therefore that what I'm seeing has just morphed into sexual assault/rape).
How much latitude do we allow them to work within the fetishes of their users, which may occasionally sound politically incorrect?
I think that my previous comments give my answer clearly. As long as we can see that it is pretend, make-believe, stuff, that's fine. When it looks real, it has to play nicely.
What exactly would be sex-positive, non-phallocentric, and/or non-heteronormative?
Sex-positive: We start with the "consent is sexy" criterion outlined above. There's no boundaries on the type of sex that can be counted as sex-positive, it's about the way the performers and/or characters relate to them that matters. When we're dealing with fantasy settings, of course, it's a little bit different because fantasies can involve all sorts of coercive, violent or forced scenarios. With that, the key is to say "this is fantasy, and fantasies are okay" - as discussed in the previous answers. In general, the attitude should be Your Kink Is OK.
In the "hymen-gate" scenario, I think most commenters are agreed that Nicki Blue's kink (this fantasy of first vaginal sex to be on live streaming broadcast) is OK for her to have, and it's okay for Kink[Inc] to help her fulfil it. There are more questions about the conception of it being her hymen being broken, not least because that's not accurate anatomically. I find myself squicking at the idea of what I think customers might bring to, and take from, this thing, and that is problematic because there is always the suspicion of some sense of elitism about it (i.e. the dubious notion/intuition that "it's okay for me to have these fantasies, but it's not okay for you to have them, because I have x,y,z qualification to do so and you don't"). Part of that squick - the legitimate part, perhaps - is based on the way the first press release was worded, with its conflation of "innocence", "virginity" and "hymen". That seems to me to be sex-negative because it demotes other types of sexual contact, and it fetishises those things beyond the specifics of Nicki Blue's fantasy placing some objective and special value on them.
Non-phallocentric: This is difficult for me to answer. Some fantasies are necessarily penis-based: indeed, Nicki Blue's fantasy was specifically of having a cock (and not some other body-part or object) do the deed. So I don't think it's possible to judge from a single scene or item of output from a porn company whether its work is "phallocentric" or not, because some bits inevitably will be phallocentric - that's just the nature of the fantasies that those pieces fulfil! But in a wider sense I think it is possible to look at whether the phallus is made central to the presentation of the work, whether the phallus is always at the centre of the various works produced, and so on.
I can't recall who or where (I thought it was Figleaf @ Real Adult Sex but haven't been able to find the post there), but someone wrote a piece a while back noting that porn tends, whether or not it shows female orgasm, to end when the male ejaculates. This is the essence of phallocentrism. The exception tends to be BDSM porn, where sometimes the sequence is [set of BDSM kink activities] - [woman denied orgasm] - [more BDSM activities] - [woman masturbated to orgasm]. Some people would not describe this as genuinely "sex", however. I think that a porn company with a wide range of scenes in their output, appealing to various types of kink, that show sex continuing after ejaculation (and even, after loss of wood) would be unequivocally non-phallocentric. Such sex could include many of the types I suggested in my "different virginities" post.
Non-heteronormative: The epitome of heteronormativity is Penis-in-Vagina sex, and in particular holding that up as the "gold standard" of sex against which all other sexual activities are lesser or not even sex at all. This was definitely the problem with portraying Nicki Blue's scene as being unqualified "losing her virginity" and even "losing her innocence". The further away one moves from that one-man-and-one-woman-PiV scenario, the further one moves from the centre of heteronormative sex. I say "centre of", because adding more women to have PiV sex is still pretty heteronormative. Adding more men to have PiV sex with the woman (as in the Kink[Inc] scene with Nicki Blue) is also pretty heteronormative. Annoyingly, such is the way that sexuality is normally portrayed, two women having sex with one another and with a man also falls into heteronormative structures - that scene typically gets classified as "straight sex" by porn marketers, whereas two men having sex with each other and a woman is considered "bi". Similarly, heterosexual oral sex is often treated as a precursor to PiV sex (i.e. as foreplay) rather than as sex in its own right (and so the presentation remains heteronormative) while heterosexual anal sex is often (though not always) portrayed as "extreme" in some way - moving beyond the boundaries of "proper" sex but in the other direction (making PiV the standard to which we must return).
One of the biggest ways to get away from heteronormativity might be to get away from phallocentricity. This removes the primacy of PiV (or indeed, penis-in-anywhere) sexuality and opens the field to sex with other genders and other routes.
In constructive terms, what guidelines could we offer?
I'm not sure how qualified I am to give specific guidelines, and wuld prefer to leave that to people who are already professionals or have experience in the industry. I have presented in this post my feelings and thoughts on the values that might instruct those guidelines, and probably some ideas about those guidelines have appeared in amongst those thoughts, but I don't want to make a clear statement that would, to my mind, be speaking out of turn.
At some point, Kink has to be allowed to describe the actual fantasy in fantasy language, in order to attract people who think the fantasy is hot. If they can’t do that in their press releases or in their banner ads, then where can they do it?
To my mind, a press release should be about facts rather than fantasies. One might factually describe a fantasy that one intends to recreate, but in that case there needs to be a clearly expressed "fantasy box" - the revised version of the Kink[Inc] press release shows how this can be done (although their new version was still imperfect). It labels clearly "this is what is going to happen" and then "this is what it is going to portray".
Advertising materials are a wider category than press releases alone. I would think that there may be some parallels with book publishing here. The blurb that appears on the back of a novel would generally talk exclusively about the story to be found in the pages, giving enough information to titillate the reader's interest. However, when a publisher makes a press release about the same book, it tends to talk about what the author was trying to do with it. It places the novel inside that "fantasy box" and discusses it as a fantasy that is created by those outside the fantasy.
In the same way, while press releases about porn shoots should stick to the facts (or at least, put the fantasy in a box), in the blurb about porn we can talk in fantasy language to "attract people who think the fantasy is hot". Do banner ads count as blurb? I think probably yes - in the same way that the adverts for novels tie into the fantasy, not the facts of the novel writing. I think that the issue with the banner ads in the "hymen-gate" case was more that they blur the reality and fantasy too much, which was one of the key points about the whole presentation.
The distinction between "reality porn" and other porn helps me clarify my thoughts -- thanks!
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