ColumnAre you a feminist? Do you like porn? Luckily your politics and your pleasure can hang out in the same room without humiliating each other: feminist porn is here to stay.

Feminism is complicated – it has come in waves and continues to exist in camps. It’s less and less a dirty word – even some celebs are embracing the once-shunned Big F — it’s become a trend (for better or worse).

But when it comes to pleasure, there’s long been a divide between anti-porn/anti-sex feminists and sex-positive feminists. Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon rose to prominence in the seventies and eighties by trying to ban porn, not to mention sex work in general. Their argument was that all forms of sex in the marketplace – porn, prostitution, etc. – required the ipso facto exploitation of women. There could be no nuance or exception — porn was all bad, and all porn performers were unequivocal victims.

If women were turned on by porn, it was because there was something wrong with them, according to the Dworkin/MacKinnon coterie. Brave pioneers like my friend performance artist/porn star/eco-sex activist Annie Sprinkle have always been out there fighting the good fight and telling the truth about women in and around porn. It’s been a long road, but the new wave of feminist porn is here — and it’s exploding into mainstream consciousness.

Advocates of feminist porn argue that anti-porn feminists ignore the agency of all women by assuming that porn performers are victims, or worse — self-delusional. It’s true that there are plenty of demeaning images in old-school porn, made by men for men. But throwing the baby out with the (porn-star) bathwater only deprives women of discovering their own relationship with the meaning of pleasure. One can identify images that are truly dehumanizing and use alternative images — those that are empowering, beautiful, and truly hot. What’s better than a video that gets you off and agrees with your politics? Orgasms that come with progressive street cred are wonderful orgasms indeed.

In the last ten years or so, pro-sex feminists have begun winning the porn wars, in large measure, by taking porn into their own hands: producing, writing, directing, and starring in it.

The ultra-fascinating “Feminist Porn Book” offers its own broad definition of feminist porn:

As both an established and emerging genre of pornography, feminist porn uses sexually explicit imagery to contest and complicate dominant representations of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, ability, age, body type, and other identity markers. It explores concepts of desire, agency, power, beauty and pleasure at their most confounding and difficult, including pleasure within and across inequality, in the face of injustice, and against the limits of gender hierarchy and both hetero-normativity and homo-normativity. It seeks to unsettle conventional definitions of sex, and expand the language of sex and an erotic activity, an expression of identity, a power exchange, a cultural commodity, and even a new politics.

Put more simply: feminist porn is inclusive, and it’s not made exclusively for men, like most mainstream porn. That doesn’t mean that it’s softcore Cinemax or light erotica a la the cheesy, bodice-ripping Harelquin. If you blushed reading “Fifty Shades of Grey,” you’ll probably turn even redder watching anything labeled feminist porn. But it’s worth the hot cheeks – you can really learn something about yourself by letting yourself go there.

In part two of this series, I’ll introduce you to a few breakout producers and stars in the genre.

Got a question for Stefanie? Email stefanie at ecosalon dot com, and she’ll answer it in the next Sexual Healing column.

Keep in touch with Stefanie on Twitter: @ecosexuality

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Image: Lara Cores

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