The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure by Tristan Taormino, Constance Penley, Celine Parrenas Shimizu, Mireille Miller-Young Read Free Book Online Page A

adult entertainment could be a tool for sexual knowledge and empowerment for women, and could help men understand how women feel and what they want.
    I knew that the most important element that had to change was the erotic depiction. I wasn’t interested in creating the typical soap opera story line most producers thought women wanted, and then cutting to the usual formulaic sex once it was time for a sex scene. Enter my first business partner, Lauren Neimi, a talented photographer with a great idea: erotic rock videos from a female perspective. MTV was all the rage then, and Lauren had come to New York looking for backers. A friend of mine overheard her pitching her idea and suggested she talk to me. I thought it was the perfect solution. My husband’s father was a successful producer and distributor in Europe who had invested in several big-budget American erotic features, and had mentioned a few times that he thought I would make a good director, so upon hearing our concept he offered to finance it. As all the pieces fell remarkably into place with an ease that felt predetermined by fate, I gave up the notion of leaving Candida Royalle behind and surrendered to what seemed to be my calling.
    In early 1984 Lauren and I created Femme Productions. We watched a variety of porn and erotica to help us determine how we would make our work different and more female-oriented. First, we agreed the sex would be explicit. We weren’t interested in overly graphic shots of giant genitalia or what we called the “gynecological close-up,” but we also weren’t interested in promoting the idea that genitals are ugly and must be hidden from view. As would be confirmed by letters we received, viewers wanted to see it all, but they wanted to see it done with taste and subtlety rather than having it rubbed in their face. Second, the almighty money shot had to go. We figured that with 99.9 percent of all porn ending every scene with a cum shot, it was time that people had an alternative. We preferred to show people’s faces while climaxing, or their hands gripping, or their bodies or butts contracting. And third, the porn formulahad to go. We wanted to throw it out and start fresh, to focus less on genitalia and more on sensuality. We wanted to portray a sense of connectedness, tenderness, communication, passion, excitement, and longing. We wanted to portray women with real bodies, of all ages and types, who our female viewers could relate to and identify with, and men who seemed to care about their partners, who wanted to please and satisfy them.
    On a technical level, we had to create a whole new way of shooting. In traditional porn, it looks mechanical because it is mechanical. You’re basically shooting from a checklist and you’ve got to get plenty of footage of each type of sex act, from all the standard angles, to fulfill your obligations to your distributor. So you might set up the lights and cameras to shoot about twenty minutes worth of fellatio from one angle, and then stop and reset the lights and cameras to shoot it from another angle, and so on. Clearly this leaves little room for spontaneity and makes the work of the actor much tougher as he attempts to maintain his erection while the actress does her best to keep him excited during all this stop-and-go setup for hours on end.
    Lauren and I employed a more cinema vérité style of shooting where very little was predetermined, other than discussing with the performers what sorts of things we thought their characters might do and the sorts of things we’d like to see. We allowed them to bring something of themselves to the scene while staying in character, even if it was a simple fantasy vignette, as in our early work. Allowing them to have a say about whom they worked with, our first choice being real couples, insured a more authentic sense of desire. At the same time we allowed our camera people free rein to move around the lovers unrestricted by pre-set angles and