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 B

positions, catching moments as they happened.
    Whether it was me or Lauren directing, we would try to sit close enough to both the actors and the camera person(s) to be able to whisper direction to them while remaining as unobtrusive as possible. Over time, as I incorporated more detailed story lines that necessitated more staging and storyboarding, I still maintained the same approach to filming the erotic scenes. When it worked, what resulted was an intimacy between the actors, the person behind the camera, and the director, that led to a feeling of pure magic. You just knew when you had created something special, something that would touch people on a deep, erotic level. It didn’t always turn out that way, but I felt a great sense of joy and accomplishment when it did.
    As Lauren and I experimented and worked out this new style of making porn in the early stages of Femme, it seemed so easy to us that wemarveled over the fact that no one else had thought to do this. Of course, no one else had because the idea of a women’s or couples’ market for porn was completely unheard of. My father-in-law’s offer to finance our concept had come with a condition: I had to first find a distributor. This turned out to be our biggest challenge. When most of the major adult companies patted me on the head and informed me that there was no such market—“this is a boy’s club,” said one of them—that just made me even more determined. I knew they were wrong. I finally got one of the better-known companies, VCA Pictures, to agree to distribute our movies, and with little marketing and promotion, our first three Femme videos, Femme (1984), Urban Heat (1984), and Christine’s Secret (1986), were met with overwhelming enthusiasm and commercial success.
    After our first year, Lauren moved on to pursue other projects and I continued on with Femme. In 1986, my husband and I started Femme Distribution, negotiated with VCA to get back our first three titles, and took on the domestic and international distribution of the Femme line. We produced five more titles, including the three-volume Star Director Series, in which I invited four other close friends who had been adult film stars—Annie Sprinkle, Gloria Leonard, Veronica Vera, and Veronica Hart—to write and direct their own short stories. In the meantime, to reach the demographic I was targeting without having to spend big advertising dollars, I put to use what I learned in my college public-speaking course and became the spokesperson for Femme. I knew the media would eat up a story about a former porn star who dared to take on the male-dominated porn industry, and it didn’t hurt that I wasn’t at all what they expected to find when they came to interview me. Once we went into distribution I moved out of my home office and into a loft in the up-and-coming, hip SoHo area of Manhattan, and instead of being greeted by a blond, buxom nymphet from Porn Valley, they were welcomed by a spiky salt-and-pepper-haired woman who was very New York. I had my detractors, but most members of the press got what I was trying to do and appreciated the inroads I was making.
    Over time Femme had garnered an impressive media presence that included Time, Glamour, the New York Times, Times of London, and countless more publications and appearances on nearly every major TV show including The Phil Donahue Show, where I, a nervous newbie in political debate, successfully squared off with Catherine MacKinnon. I had succeeded in creating enough demand for my line that retailers were forced to stock it if they wanted to get in on the new and growing women’s and couples’ market.
    In 1988 my husband and I separated, and I began to oversee bothproduction and distribution. After a few years, I was exhausted and realized I couldn’t be both the creative director and the distributor. In 1995 I approached PHE, Inc./Adam and Eve, a company owned by Phil Harvey, who was known for his political and philanthropic