The Feminist Porn Book is the first collection to bring together writ-ings by feminist porn producers and feminist porn scholars to engage, challenge, and re-imagine pornography. As collaborating editors of this volume, we are three porn professors and one porn direc- tor who have had an energetic dialogue about feminist politics and por- nography for years. In their criticism, feminist opponents of porn cast pornography as a monolithic medium and industry and make sweep- ing generalizations about its production, its workers, its consumers, and its effects on society. These antiporn feminists respond to feminist por- nographers and feminist porn professors in several ways. They accuse us of deceiving ourselves and others about the nature of pornography; they claim we fail to look critically at any porn and hold up all porn as empowering. More typically, they simply dismiss out of hand our abil- ity or authority to make it or study it. But The Feminist Porn Book offers arguments, facts, and histories that cannot be summarily rejected, by providing on-the-ground and well-researched accounts of the politics of producing pleasure. Our agenda is twofold: to explore the emergence and significance of a thriving feminist porn movement, and to gather some of the best new feminist scholarship on pornography. By putting our voices into conversation, this book sparks new thinking about the richness and complexity of porn as a genre and an industry in a way that helps us to appreciate the work that feminists in the porn industry are doing, both in the mainstream and on its countercultural edges. So to begin, we offer a broad definition of feminist porn, which will be fleshed out, debated, and examined in the pieces that follow. As both an established and emerging genre of pornography, feminist porn uses sexually explicit imagery to contest and complicate dominant represen- tations of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, 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 heteronormativity and homo- Introduction: The Politics of Producing Pleasure CONSTANCE PENLEY, CELINE PARREÑAS SHIMIZU, MIREILLE MILLER-YOUNG, and TRISTAN TAORMINO Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 9 11/14/12 2:24 PM normativity. It seeks to unsettle conventional definitions of sex, and expand the language of sex as an erotic activity, an expression of identity, a power exchange, a cultural commodity, and even a new politics. Feminist porn creates alternative images and develops its own aes- thetics and iconography to expand established sexual norms and dis- courses. It evolved out of and incorporates elements from the genres of “porn for women,” “couples porn,” and lesbian porn as well as feminist photography, performanc.

1. The Feminist Porn Book is the first collection to bring together
writ-ings by feminist porn producers and feminist porn scholars
to engage, challenge, and re-imagine pornography. As
collaborating
editors of this volume, we are three porn professors and one
porn direc-
tor who have had an energetic dialogue about feminist politics
and por-
nography for years. In their criticism, feminist opponents of
porn cast
pornography as a monolithic medium and industry and make
sweep-
ing generalizations about its production, its workers, its
consumers, and
its effects on society. These antiporn feminists respond to
feminist por-
nographers and feminist porn professors in several ways. They
accuse
us of deceiving ourselves and others about the nature of
pornography;
they claim we fail to look critically at any porn and hold up all
porn as
empowering. More typically, they simply dismiss out of hand
our abil-
ity or authority to make it or study it. But The Feminist Porn
Book offers
arguments, facts, and histories that cannot be summarily
rejected, by
providing on-the-ground and well-researched accounts of the
politics
of producing pleasure. Our agenda is twofold: to explore the
emergence

2. and significance of a thriving feminist porn movement, and to
gather
some of the best new feminist scholarship on pornography. By
putting
our voices into conversation, this book sparks new thinking
about the
richness and complexity of porn as a genre and an industry in a
way that
helps us to appreciate the work that feminists in the porn
industry are
doing, both in the mainstream and on its countercultural edges.
So to begin, we offer a broad definition of feminist porn, which
will
be fleshed out, debated, and examined in the pieces that follow.
As both
an established and emerging genre of pornography, feminist
porn uses
sexually explicit imagery to contest and complicate dominant
represen-
tations of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class, 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 heteronormativity and
homo-
Introduction: The Politics of Producing Pleasure
CONSTANCE PENLEY, CELINE PARREÑAS SHIMIZU,
MIREILLE MILLER-YOUNG, and TRISTAN TAORMINO

3. Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 9 11/14/12 2:24 PM
normativity. It seeks to unsettle conventional definitions of sex,
and
expand the language of sex as an erotic activity, an expression
of identity,
a power exchange, a cultural commodity, and even a new
politics.
Feminist porn creates alternative images and develops its own
aes-
thetics and iconography to expand established sexual norms and
dis-
courses. It evolved out of and incorporates elements from the
genres of
“porn for women,” “couples porn,” and lesbian porn as well as
feminist
photography, performance art, and experimental filmmaking. It
does
not assume a singular female viewer, but acknowledges multiple
female
(and other) viewers with many different preferences. Feminist
porn
makers emphasize the importance of their labor practices in
production
and their treatment of performers/sex workers; in contrast to
norms in
the mainstream sectors of the adult entertainment industry, they
strive
to create a fair, safe, ethical, consensual work environment and
often cre-
ate imagery through collaboration with their subjects.
Ultimately, femi-
nist porn considers sexual representation—and its production—a

4. site
for resistance, intervention, and change.
The concept of feminist porn is rooted in the 1980s—the height
of the
feminist porn wars in the United States. The porn wars (also
known as
the sex wars) emerged out of a debate between feminists about
the role of
sexualized representation in society and grew into a full-scale
divide that
has lasted over three decades. In the heyday of the women’s
movement
in the United States, a broad-based, grassroots activist struggle
over the
proliferation of misogynistic and violent representations in
corporate
media was superceded by an effort focused specifically on
legally ban-
ning the most explicit, and seemingly most sexist, media:
pornography.
Employing Robin Morgan’s slogan, “Porn is the theory, rape is
the prac-
tice,” antipornography feminists argued that pornography
amounted to
the commodification of rape. As a group called Women Against
Pornog-
raphy (WAP) began to organize in earnest to ban obscenity
across the
nation, other feminists, such as Lisa Duggan, Nan D. Hunter,
Kate Ellis,
and Carol Vance became vocal critics of what they viewed as
WAP’s ill-
conceived collusion with a sexually conservative Reagan
administration
and Christian Right, and their warping of feminist activism into

5. a moral
hygiene or public decency movement. Regarding antiporn
feminism as
a huge setback for the feminist struggle to empower women and
sexual
minorities, an energetic community of sex worker and sex-
radical activ-
ists joined anticensorship and sex-positive feminists to build the
founda-
tion for the feminist porn movement.1
The years that led up to the feminist porn wars are often
referred to as
the “golden age of porn,” a period from the early 1970s to the
early 1980s,
INTRODUCTION10
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 10 11/14/12 2:24 PM
marked by large budget, high-production-value feature films
that were
theatrically released. A group of female porn performers who
worked
during the golden age—including Annie Sprinkle, Veronica
Vera, Can-
dida Royalle, Gloria Leonard, and Veronica Hart—formed a
support
group (the first of its kind) called Club 90 in New York City. In
1984, the
feminist arts collective Carnival Knowledge asked Club 90 to
participate
in a festival called The Second Coming, and explore the
question, “Is

6. there a feminist pornography?”2 It is one of the first
documented times
when feminists publicly posed and examined this critical query.
That same year, Club 90 member Candida Royalle founded
Femme
Productions to create a new genre: porn from a woman’s point
of view.3
Her films focused on storylines, high production values, female
plea-
sure, and romance. In San Francisco, publishers Myrna Elana
and Debo-
rah Sundahl, along with Nan Kinney and Susie Bright, co-
founded On
Our Backs, the first porn magazine by and for lesbians. A year
later, Kin-
ney and Sundahl started Fatale Video to produce and distribute
lesbian
porn movies that expanded the mission that On Our Backs
began.4 In the
mainstream adult industry, performer and registered nurse Nina
Hartley
began producing and starring in a line of sex education videos
for Adam
and Eve, with her first two titles released in 1984. A parallel
movement
began to emerge throughout Europe in the 1980s and 90s.5
By the 1990s, Royalle and Hartley’s success had made an
impact on
the mainstream adult industry. Major studios, including Vivid,
VCA, and
Wicked, began producing their own lines of couples porn that
reflected
Royalle’s vision and generally followed a formula of softer,
gentler, more

7. romantic porn with storylines and high production values. The
growth
of the “couples porn” genre signified a shift in the industry:
female desire
and viewership were finally acknowledged, if narrowly defined.
This
provided more selection for female viewers and more
opportunities
for women to direct mainstream heterosexual films, including
Veron-
ica Hart and Kelly Holland (aka Toni English). Independent,
lesbian-
produced lesbian porn grew at a slower pace, but Fatale Video
(which
continued to produce new films until the mid-1990s) finally had
some
company in its micro-genre with work by Annie Sprinkle, Maria
Beatty,
and Shar Rednour and Jackie Strano. Sprinkle also made the
first porn
film to feature a trans man, and Christopher Lee followed with a
film
starring an entire cast of trans men.6
In the early 2000s, feminist porn began to take hold in the
United
States with the emergence of filmmakers who specifically
identified
themselves and/or their work as feminist including Buck Angel,
Dana
Dane, Shine Louise Houston, Courtney Trouble, Madison
Young, and
11INTRODUCTION
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 11 11/14/12 2:24 PM

8. Tristan Taormino. Simultaneously, feminist filmmakers in
Europe began
to gain notoriety for their porn and sexually explicit
independent films,
including Erika Lust in Spain; Anna Span and Petra Joy in the
UK; Emi-
lie Jouvet, Virginie Despentes, and Taiwan-born Shu Lea
Cheang in
France; and Mia Engberg, who created a compilation of feminist
porn
shorts that was famously funded by the Swedish government.
The modern feminist porn movement gained tremendous ground
in
2006 with the creation of The Feminist Porn Awards (FPAs).
Chanelle
Gallant and other staffers at sex-positive sex toy shop Good for
Her in
Toronto created the awards, which were open to films that met
one or
more of the following criteria:
(1) A woman had a hand in the production, writing, direction,
etc.
of the work; (2) It depicts genuine female pleasure; and/or (3) It
expands the boundaries of sexual representation on film and
chal-
lenges stereotypes that are often found in mainstream porn. And
of
course, it has to be hot! Overall, Feminist Porn Award winners
tend
to show movies that consider a female viewer from start to
finish.

9. This means that you are more likely to see active desire and
consent,
real orgasms, and women taking control of their own fantasies
(even
when that fantasy is to hand over that control).7
These criteria simultaneously assumed and announced a
viewership, an
authorship, an industry, and a collective consciousness.
Embedded in the
description is a female viewer and what she likely wants to
see—active
desire, consent, real orgasms, power, and agency—and doesn’t
want to
see: passivity, stereotypes, coercion, or fake orgasms. The
language is
broad enough so as not to be prescriptive, yet it places value on
agency
and authenticity, with a parenthetical nod to the possibility that
not
every woman’s fantasy is to be “in control.” While the
guidelines nota-
bly focus on a woman’s involvement in production, honored
filmmakers
run the gamut from self-identified feminist pornographers to
indepen-
dent female directors to mainstream porn producers; the broad
criteria
achieve a certain level of inclusiveness and acknowledge that a
range of
work can be read by audiences, critics, and academics as
feminist. The
FPA ceremony attracts and honors filmmakers from around the
world,
and each year since its inception, every aspect of the event has
grown,

10. from the number of films submitted to the number of attendees.
The
FPAs have raised awareness about feminist porn among a wider
audi-
ence and helped coalesce a community of filmmakers,
performers, and
fans; they highlight an industry within an industry, and, in the
process,
nurture this growing movement. In 2009, Dr. Laura Méritt
(Berlin) cre-
INTRODUCTION12
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 12 11/14/12 2:24 PM
ated the PorYes campaign and the European Feminist Porn
Award mod-
eled on the FPAs. Because the movement has had the most
momentum
in Europe and North America, this volume concentrates on the
scholar-
ship and films of Western nations. We acknowledge this
limitation: for
feminist porn to be a global project, more would need to be
done to
include non-Western scholars and pornographers in the
conversation.
The work we do now, as scholars and producers, could not exist
without early examinations of the history and context of
pornogra-
phy, including Caught Looking: Feminism, Pornography and
Censorship
by FACT, the Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force. Linda

11. Williams’s
groundbreaking 1989 Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the
“Frenzy of the
Visible” opened the door for feminist scholars to productively
examine
pornography as film and popular culture, as a genre and
industry, tex-
tually, historically, and sociologically. Laura Kipnis’s 1996
Bound and
Gagged: Pornography and the Politics of Fantasy in America
made the
strongest possible case that “the differences between
pornography and
other forms of culture are less meaningful than their
similarities.”8 Jane
Juffer’s 1996 At Home with Pornography: Women, Sex, and
Everyday
Life urged us to pay close attention not just to the hardcore porn
typi-
cally consumed by men but to the uses of pornography in the
daily lives
of ordinary women. Since 1974 the film magazine Jump Cut has
pub-
lished more original scholarship on porn from a pro-sex,
anticensorship
perspective than any other media journal and by leading figures
in the
field, including Chuck Kleinhans, Linda Williams, Laura
Kipnis, Rich-
ard Dyer, Thomas Waugh, Eithne Johnson, Eric Schaefer, Peter
Lehman,
Robert Eberwein, and Joanna Russ. More recently, Drucilla
Cornell’s
Feminism and Pornography, Linda Williams’s Porn Studies, and
Pamela
Church Gibson’s More Dirty Looks: Gender, Pornography and

12. Power
cemented the value of porn scholarship.9 The Feminist Porn
Book seeks
to further that scholarship by adding a significant, valuable
component:
feminists creating pornography.
In this book, we identify a forty-year-long movement of
thinkers,
viewers, and makers, grounded in their desire to use
pornography to
explore new sexualities in representation. The work we have
collected
here defies other feminist conceptions of sexuality on screen as
forever
marked by a threat. That threat is the specter of violence against
women,
which is the primary way that pornography has come to be seen.
Claim-
ing that explicit sexual representations are nothing but gender
oppres-
sion means that pornography’s portrayal of explicit sex acts is a
form
of absolute discipline and subjugation for women. Within this
frame,
women who watch, study, or work in pornography bear the mark
of
13INTRODUCTION
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 13 11/14/12 2:24 PM
false consciousness—as if they dabble in fire while ignoring the
risk of

13. burning.
The overwhelming popularity of women’s erotic literature,
illustrated
by the recent worldwide best seller, Fifty Shades of Grey by EL
James, and
the flourishing women’s fan fiction community from which it
emerged,
proves that there is great demand among women for explicit
sexual rep-
resentations. Millions of female readers embraced the Fifty
Shades of
Grey trilogy—which follows a young woman who becomes the
submis-
sive sexual partner to a dominant man—not for its depiction of
oppres-
sion, but for its exploration of erotic freedom. Women-authored
erotica
and pornography speaks to fantasies women actually have,
fantasies that
are located in a world where women must negotiate power
constantly,
including in their imaginations and desires. As with the criteria
for win-
ning a Feminist Porn Award, these books and the feminist porn
move-
ment show that “women are taking control of their own
fantasies (even
when that fantasy is to hand over control).”
With the emergence of new technologies that allow more people
than
ever to both create and consume pornography, the moral panic-
driven
fears of porn are ratcheted up once again. Society’s dread of
women who

14. own their desire, and use it in ways that confound expectations
of proper
female sexuality, persists. As Gayle Rubin shows, “Modern
Western
societies appraise sex acts according to a hierarchical system of
sexual
value.”10 Rubin maps this system as one where “the charmed
circle” is
perpetually threatened by the “outer limits” or those who fall
out of the
bounds of the acceptable. On the bottom of this hierarchy are
sexual acts
and identities outside heterosexuality, marriage, monogamy, and
repro-
duction. She argues that this hierarchy exists so as to justify the
privi-
leging of normative and constricted sexualities and the
denigration and
punishment of the “sexual rabble.”11 The Feminist Porn Book
showcases
precisely these punishable sex acts and identities that are
outside of the
charmed circle and proudly sides with the sexual rabble.
Spotlighting the
numerous ways people confront the power of sexuality, this
book paves
the way for exploring the varieties of what were previously
dismissed as
perversities. At the same time, feminist porn can also expose
what passes
for “normal” sexuality at the center of that charmed circle.
One of the unfortunate results of the porn wars was the fixing of
an antiporn camp versus a sex-positive/pro-porn camp. On one
side, a
capital P “Pornography” was a visual embodiment of the

15. patriarchy and
violence against women. On the other, Porn was defended as
“speech,”
or as a form that should not be foreclosed because it might some
day be
transformed into a vehicle for women’s erotic expression. The
nuances
INTRODUCTION14
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 14 11/14/12 2:24 PM
and complexities of actual lowercase “pornographies” were lost
in the
middle. For example, sex-positive thinking does not always
accom-
modate the ways in which women are constrained by sexuality.
But
the problem with antipornography’s assumption that sex is
inherently
oppressive to women—that women are debased when they have
sex on
camera—ignores and represses the sexuality of women. Hence,
for us,
sex-positive feminist porn does not mean that sex is always a
ribbon-tied
box of happiness and joy. Instead, feminist porn captures the
struggle to
define, understand, and locate one’s sexuality. It recognizes the
impor-
tance of deferring judgment about the significance of sex in
intimate and
social relations, and of not presuming what sex means for
specific peo-

16. ple. Feminist porn explores sexual ideas and acts that may be
fraught,
confounding, and deeply disturbing to some, and liberating and
empow-
ering to others. What we see at work here are competing
definitions of
sexuality that expose the power of sexuality in all of its
unruliness.
Because feminist porn acknowledges that identities are socially
situ-
ated and that sexuality has the power to discipline, punish, and
subju-
gate, that unruliness may involve producing images that seem
oppressive,
degrading, or violent. Feminist porn does not shy away from the
darker
shades of women’s fantasies. It creates a space for realizing the
contradic-
tory ways in which our fantasies do not always line up with our
politics
or ideas of who we think we are. As Tom Waugh argues,
participation in
pornography, in his case as spectator, can be a “process of
social identity
formation.”12 Indeed, social identities and ideas are formed in
the act of
viewing porn, but also in making and writing about it.
Strongly influenced by other social movements in the realm of
sexu-
ality, like the sex-positive, LGBT rights, and sex workers’
rights move-
ments, feminist porn aims to build community, to expand liberal
views
on gender and sexuality, and to educate and empower

17. performers and
audiences. It favors fair, ethical working conditions for sex
workers and
the inclusion of underrepresented identities and practices.
Feminist porn
vigorously challenges the hegemonic depictions of gender, sex
roles, and
the pleasure and power of mainstream porn. It also challenges
the anti-
porn feminist interpretive framework for pornography as
bankrupt of
progressive sexual politics. As a budding movement, it
promotes aes-
thetic and ethical practices that intervene in dominant sexual
represen-
tation and mobilize a collective vision for change. This erotic
activism,
while in no way homogeneous or consistent, works within and
against
the marketplace to imagine new ways to envision gender and
sexuality
in our culture.
But feminist porn is not only an emergent social movement and
an
15INTRODUCTION
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 15 11/14/12 2:24 PM
alternative cultural production: it is a genre of media made for
profit. Part
of a multibillion dollar business in adult entertainment media,
feminist

18. porn is an industry within an industry. Some feminist porn is
produced
independently, often created and marketed by and for
underrepresented
minorities like lesbians, transgender folks, and people of color.
But femi-
nist porn is also produced within the mainstream adult industry
by fem-
inists whose work is funded and distributed by large companies
such
as Vivid Entertainment, Adam and Eve, and Evil Angel
Productions.
As outliers or insiders (or both) to the mainstream industry,
feminists
have adapted different strategies for subverting dominant
pornographic
norms and tropes. Some reject nearly all elements of a typical
adult film,
from structure to aesthetics, while others tweak the standard
formula
(from “foreplay” to “come shot”) to reposition and prioritize
female sex-
ual agency. Although feminist porn makers define their work as
distinct
from mainstream porn, it is nonetheless viewed by a range of
people,
including people who identify as feminist and specifically seek
it out, as
well as other viewers who don’t. Feminist porn is gaining
momentum
and visibility as a market and a movement. This movement is
made up of
performers turned directors, independent queer producers,
politicized
sex workers, porn geeks and bloggers, and radical sex
educators. These

19. are the voices found here. This is the perfect time for The
Feminist Porn
Book.
In this book, we place academics alongside and in conversation
with
sex industry workers to bridge the divide between rigorous
research and
critique, and real world challenges and interventions. In Jill
Nagle’s semi-
nal work Whores and Other Feminists, she announced, “This
time . . .
sex worker feminists speak not as guests, nor as disgruntled
exiles, but
as insiders to feminism.”13 As in Nagle’s collection, here those
working in
the porn industry speak for themselves, and their narratives
illuminate
their complicated experiences, contradict one another, and
expose the
damaging one-dimensional rhetoric of the antiporn feminist
resurgence.
Like feminist porn itself, the diverse voices in this collection
challenge
entrenched, divisive dichotomies of academic and popular,
scholar and
sex worker, pornographer and feminist.
In the first section of the book, Making Porn, Debating Porn,
feminist
porn pioneers Betty Dodson, Candida Royalle, and Susie Bright
give a
grounded history of feminist porn as it emerged in the 1980s in
response
to the limiting sexual imagination of both mainstream porn and
anti-

20. porn feminism. Providing a window into the generative and
deeply con-
tested period of the sex wars, these feminist pornographers
highlight the
stakes and energies surrounding the birth of feminist porn
activism in
INTRODUCTION16
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 16 11/14/12 2:24 PM
the face of an antiporn feminism that ignored, misunderstood, or
vilified
them and their efforts. Bright’s account of watching her first
porn film,
sitting among suspicious men in a dark adult theater, sets the
stage for
how the invention of the VHS player shifted women’s
consumption of
porn and dramatically changed the marketplace.
In the last decade, a new war on porn has been resurrected and
rede-
fined by Gail Dines, Sheila Jeffries, Karen Boyle, Pamela Paul,
Robert
Jensen, and others. Feona Attwood and Clarissa Smith show
how this
resurgent antiporn movement resists theory and evidence, and
tenden-
tiously reframes the production and consumption of porn as a
mode of
sex trafficking, a form of addiction, or a public health problem
of epi-
demic proportions. Attwood and Smith’s work powerfully

21. exposes how
feminist porn remains challenged and often censored in
contemporary
popular discourse. Lynn Comella focuses on the consequences
of por-
nography going public. She examines one of the most
significant ele-
ments of the emergence of feminist porn: the growth of sex-
positive,
women-owned-and-run sex shops and a grassroots sex education
move-
ment that create space for women to produce, find, and consume
new
kinds of pornography.
Watching and Being Watched examines how desire and agency
inform pornographic performance, representation, and
spectatorship.
Sinnamon Love and Mireille Miller-Young explore the complex
position
of African American women as they watch, critique, and create
repre-
sentations of black women’s sexuality. Dylan Ryan and Jane
Ward take up
the concept of authenticity in porn: what it means, how it’s
read, and why
it is (or is not) crucial to feminist porn performance and
spectatorship.
Ingrid Ryberg looks at how public screenings of queer, feminist,
and les-
bian porn can create spaces for sexual empowerment. Tobi Hill-
Meyer
complicates Ryberg’s analysis by documenting who, until very
recently,
was left out of these spaces: trans women. Keiko Lane echoes
Ryberg’s

22. argument of the radical potential of queer and feminist porn and
offers
it as a tool for understanding and expressing desire among
marginalized
communities.
The intersection of feminist porn as pedagogy and feminist
pedago-
gies of porn is highlighted in Doing It In School. As porn
scholars, Con-
stance Penley and Ariane Cruz grapple with teaching and
studying porn
from two very different perspectives. Kevin Heffernan offers a
history of
sex instruction in film and contrasts it with work from Nina
Hartley and
Tristan Taormino in educational porn movies. Hartley discusses
how
she has used porn to teach throughout her twenty-five-plus
years in the
industry, and Taormino outlines her practice as a feminist
pornographer
17INTRODUCTION
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 17 11/14/12 2:24 PM
offering organic, fair-trade porn that takes into account the
labor of its
workers. Performer Danny Wylde documents his personal
experiences
with power, consent, and exploitation against a backdrop of
antiporn
rhetoric. Lorelei Lee offers a powerful manifesto that demands

23. we all
become better students in order to achieve a more nuanced,
discerning,
and thoughtful discourse about porn and sex.
Now Playing: Feminist Porn takes up questions of hyper-
corporeality, genderqueerness, transfemininity, feminized
masculinity,
transgressive racial performance, and disability. Jiz Lee
discusses how
they14 use their transgressive female body and genderqueer
identity to
defy categories. April Flores describes herself as “a fat Latina
with pale
skin, tattoos, and fire engine red hair,” and gives her unique
take on
being (and not being) a Big Beautiful Woman (BBW) performer.
Bobby
Noble explores the role of trans men and the interrogation of
mascu-
linities in feminist porn, while renowned trans male performer
Buck
Angel explodes sex/gender dichotomies by embodying his
identity of
a man with a vagina. Also concerned with the complex
representation
and performance of manhood in feminist pornography, Celine
Parreñas
Shimizu asks how race shapes the work of straight Asian male
performer
Keni Styles. Loree Erickson, a feminist pornographer and PhD
candi-
date, represents not only a convergence of scholarship and sex
work, but
one of the most overlooked subjects in pornography and one de-
erot-

24. icized in society: “queer femmegimp.” Emerging to speak from
group
identities previously missing or misnamed, the pieces in this
section are
by people who show the beauty of their desires, give shape to
their reali-
ties, reject and reclaim attributions made by others, and
describe how
they create sexual worlds that denounce inequality.
Throughout the book, we explore the multiple definitions of
feminist
porn, but we refuse to fix its boundaries. Feminist porn is a
genre and a
political vision. And like other genres of film and media,
feminist porn
shares common themes, aesthetics, and goals even though its
parameters
are not clearly demarcated. Because it is born out of a feminism
that is
not one thing but a living, breathing, moving creation, it is
necessar-
ily contested—an argument, a polemic, and a debate. Because it
is both
genre and practice, we must engage it as both: by reading and
analyzing
its cultural texts and examining the ideals, intentions, and
experiences
of its producers. In doing so, we offer an alternative to
unsubstantiated
oversimplifications and patronizing rhetoric. We acknowledge
the com-
plexities of watching, creating, and analyzing pornographies.
And we
believe in the radical potential of feminist porn to transform
sexual rep-

25. resentation and the way we live our sexualities.
INTRODUCTION18
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 18 11/14/12 2:24 PM
Notes
1. Robin Morgan, “Theory and Practice: Pornography and
Rape,” in Take Back the
Night, ed. Laura Lederer (New York: William Morrow, 1980),
139. On the porn wars
or sex wars, see Carolyn Bronstein, Battling Pornography: The
American Feminist
Antipornography Movement, 1976–1986 (Cambridge, MA:
Cambridge University
Press, 2011); Lisa Duggan and Nan D. Hunter, Sex Wars:
Sexual Dissent and Politi-
cal Culture (New York: Routledge, 1995); Carole Vance, ed.
Pleasure and Danger:
Exploring Female Sexuality (Boston and London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1984);
Pamela Church Gibson and Roma Gibson, eds., Dirty Looks:
Women, Pornography
and Power (London: British Film Institute, 1993); and the
documentary film by Har-
riet Koskoff, Patently Offensive: Porn Under Siege (1991).
2. Annie Sprinkle, Post-Porn Modernist: My 25 Years as a
Multimedia Whore (San
Francisco: Cleis Press, 1998), 149–51.
3. Annette Fuentes and Margaret Schrage, “Deep Inside Porn
Stars,” Jump Cut: A

26. Review of Contemporary Media 32 (1987): 41–43,
http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/
onlinessays/JC32folder/PornWomenInt.html.
4. Susie Bright, Big Sex, Little Death: A Memoir (Berkeley:
Seal Press, 2011) and
Susie Bright, “A History Of On Our Backs: Entertainment for
the Adventurous Les-
bian, The Original: 1984–1990,”
http://susiebright.blogs.com/History_of_OOB.pdf.
See also, “About Fatale Media,” accessed September 5, 2011,
http://www.fatalemedia.
com/about.html.
5. Feminists in Europe who used sexually explicit photography
and film to
explore themes like female pleasure, S/M, bondage, gender
roles, and queer desire
include Monika Treut (Germany), Cleo Uebelmann
(Switzerland), Krista Beinstein
(Germany and Austria), and Della Grace (England). In 1998,
Danish film produc-
tion company Zentropa wrote the Puzzy Power Manifesto that
outlined its guide-
lines for a new line of porn for women, which echoed Royalle’s
vision: their films
included plot-driven narratives that depicted foreplay and
emotional connection,
women’s pleasure and desire, and male and female bodies
beyond just their genitals.
See Laura Merrit, “PorYes! The European Feminist Porn
Movement,” [unpublished
manuscript] and Zentropa, “The Manifesto,” accessed January
29, 2012, http://www.
puzzypower.dk/UK/index.php/om-os/manifest.

27. 6. In addition, we must acknowledge the early work of Sachi
Hamano, the first
woman to direct “pink films” (Japanese softcore porn). Hamano
directed more than
three hundred in the 1980s and 90s in order to portray women’s
sexual power and
agency, and challenge the representation of women as sex
objects only present to
fulfill men’s fantasies. See Virginie Sélavy, “Interview with
Sachi Hamano,” December
1, 2009,
http://www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk/features/2009/12/01/int
erview-
with-sachi-hamano/.
7. Feminist Porn Awards, accessed September 5, 2011,
http://goodforher.com/
feminist_porn_awards.
8. Laura Kipnis, Bound and Gagged: Pornography and the
Politics of Fantasy in
America (New York: Grove Press, 1996), viii.
9. See Feminist Anti-Censorship Task Force, Caught Looking:
Feminism, Pornog-
raphy and Censorship, 3rd ed. (New Haven, CT: LongRiver
Books, [1986] 1992);
Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of
the Visible” (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1989); Jane Juffer, At Home
with Pornography:
Women, Sex, and Everyday Life (New York: NYU Press, 1998);
Jump Cut: A Review
19INTRODUCTION

28. Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 19 11/14/12 2:24 PM
of Contemporary Media, eds. Julia Lesage, Chuck Kleinhans,
John Hess (http://www.
ejumpcut.org); Drucilla Cornell, ed., Feminism and
Pornography (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2000); Linda Williams, ed., Porn Studies
(Durham, NC: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2004); and Pamela Church Gibson, ed., More
Dirty Looks: Gender, Por-
nography and Power (London: British Film Institute, 2004).
10. Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of
the Politics of Sexu-
ality,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed.
Carole S. Vance (Bos-
ton and London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), 279.
11. Rubin, “Thinking Sex,” 280.
12. Tom Waugh, “ Homoerotic Representation in the Stag Film
1920–1940: Imag-
ining An Audience,” Wide Angle 14, no. 2 (1992): 4.
13. Jill Nagle, ed., Whores and Other Feminists (New York and
London: Routledge,
1997), 3. Emphasis in original text.
14. Lee’s favored gender-neutral pronoun.
INTRODUCTION20
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 20 11/14/12 2:24 PM

29. I
MAKING PORN, DEBATING PORN
I
MAKING PORN, DEBATING PORN
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 21 11/14/12 2:24 PM
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 22 11/14/12 2:24 PM
Artist, author, and sexologist Betty Dodson has been one of the
prin-
cipal advocates for women’s sexual pleasure and health for over
three
decades. After her first one-woman show of erotic art in 1968,
Dod-
son produced and presented the first feminist slide show of
vulvas
at the 1973 NOW Sexuality Conference in New York City where
she
introduced the electric vibrator as a pleasure device. For
twenty-five
years, she ran Bodysex Workshops, teaching women about their
bod-
ies and orgasms. Her first book, Liberating Masturbation: A
Meditation
on Selflove, became a feminist classic. Sex for One sold over a
million
copies. Betty and her young partner Carlin Ross continue to

30. provide
sex education at dodsonandross.com. This piece is excerpted
from
Dodson’s memoir, My Romantic Love Wars: A Sexual Memoir.
When it comes to creating or watching sexual material, women
are still debating what is acceptable to make, view, or enjoy.
The porn wars rage on while most guys secretly beat off to
whatever
turns them on. Meanwhile, far too many feminists want to
control or
censor porn. Most people will agree that sex is a very personal
matter,
but now that sexual imagery has become prevalent with Internet
porn
available on our computers 24/7, I’d say—like it or not—porn is
here to
stay.
The fact that pornography is a multibillion-dollar industry and
the
engine that first drove the Internet proves that most people want
to see
images of sex whether they admit it openly or not. After
women’s sex-
ual liberation got underway in the sixties and seventies, women
turned
against each other to debate whether an image was erotic or
porno-
graphic. Unfortunately this endless and senseless debate
continues today.
My first attempt at drawing sex was a real eye opener. In 1968,
I had
my first one-woman show of erotic art titled The Love Picture
Exhibition.

31. The experience raised my awareness of the many people who
enjoyed
seeing beautiful drawings of couples having intercourse and
oral sex.
Porn Wars
BETTY DODSON
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 23 11/14/12 2:24 PM
With my second show—of masturbating nudes—all hell broke
loose.
The show not only ended my gallery affiliation, but it was then
that I
became aware of how ignorant most Americans were about
human sex-
uality. My six-foot drawing of a masturbating woman holding
an electric
vibrator next to her clitoris—an erect one at that—might have
been the
first public appearance of the clitoris in recent history. It was
1970—the
year I became a feminist activist determined to liberate
masturbation.
In 1971, I had my first encounter with censorship when
Evergreen
magazine published images of my erotic art. A Connecticut
district
attorney threatened to issue an injunction if the magazine was
not
removed from the local public library. My friend and former
lover Grant

32. Taylor drove us to Connecticut to meet with the DA. His main
objection
was my painting of an all-women orgy. He pounded his fist on
the page
spewing out the words, “Lesbianism is a clear sign of
perversion!”
When the meeting ended, the press descended on me. I don’t
recall
what I said except that sex was nice and censorship was dirty
and that
kids were never upset by my art, but their parents often were. A
few peo-
ple complimented me on my words and art. One woman said she
found
my art “disgusting and pornographic,” but that I had a right to
show it.
Her comment was the most upsetting. Driving home, I remember
ask-
ing Grant how anyone could call my beautifully drawn nudes
disgust-
ing: “Why can’t people distinguish between art that’s erotic and
art that’s
pornographic?”
“Betty, it’s all art,” he said. “Beauty or pornography will
always be in
the eyes of the beholder.” He went on to warn me against
making the
mistake of trying to define either one. It was an intellectual trap
that led
to endless debates with no agreements in sight. After thinking
about it,
I knew he was right! That night I decided to forget about
defining erotic
art as being superior to pornographic images. Instead, I

33. embraced the
label “pornographer.” All at once, I felt exhilarated by the
thought that I
could become America’s first feminist pornographer.
The next day, I got out my dictionary and found the word
pornography
originated from the Greek pornographos: the writings of
prostitutes. If
society treated sex with any dignity or respect, both
pornographers and
prostitutes would have status, which they obviously had at one
time. The
sexual women of antiquity were the artists and writers of sexual
love.
Since organized religions have made all forms of sexual
pleasure evil, no
modern equivalent exists today. As a result, knowledge of the
esteemed
courtesans was lost, buried in our collective unconscious,
suppressed by
the authoritarian organized religions that consistently excluded
women.
The idea of reclaiming women’s sexual power by creating
pornogra-
BETTY DODSON24
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 24 11/14/12 2:24 PM
phy was a heady concept. Feminists could restore historical
perspectives
of the ancient temple priestesses of Egypt, the sacred

34. prostitutes, the
Amazons of Lesbos, and the royal courtesans of the Sumerian
palaces.
Sexual love was probably what people longed for, so I gave
myself per-
mission to break the next thousand rules of social intimidation
aimed
at controlling women’s sexual behavior. I did just that and
continue to
do so to this day. In order for women to progress, we must
question
all authority, be willing to challenge any rule aimed at
controlling our
sexual behavior, and avoid doing business as usual, thereby
maintaining
the status quo.
After I fully enjoyed the United States’ brief outbreak of sexual
free-
doms that began at the end of the 1960s, my glorious group sex
par-
ties allowed me to realize how many women were faking
orgasms. So
in 1971, I designed the Bodysex Workshops to teach women
about sex
through the practice of masturbation. It was sexual
consciousness-rais-
ing at its best as we went around the circle with each woman
answering
my question: “How do you feel about your body and your
orgasm?” We
also eliminated genital shame by looking at our own vulvas and
each
other’s. Finally, we learned to harness the power of the electric
vibra-
tor with the latest techniques for self-stimulation during our all-

35. women
masturbation circles.
The Bodysex Workshops continued over the next twenty-five
years.
They took a lot out of me; I ended up sacrificing my hip joints
to women’s
sexual liberation! These groups also offered unique fieldwork in
female
masturbation, a subject rarely researched in academia, and I
ended up
with a PhD in sexology.
In 1982 at the age of fifty-three, I joined a support group of
lesbian
and bisexual women who were into consensual S/M. Perhaps I
had
avoided this small subculture because I suspected there was
something
unhealthy about mixing pain with pleasure. Instead of finding
sick, con-
fused women, I discovered a group of feminists who were
enjoying the
most politically incorrect sex imaginable. One of our first big
mistakes
as feminists was to establish politically correct sex, defined as
the ideal of
love between equals with both partners remaining monogamous.
For heterosexual women, politically correct sex put us in the
age old
bind of trying to change men by getting them to shape up and
settle
down. That meant men had to also practice monogamy—a
project that
has consistently failed for centuries. Most men are hardwired to

36. have
multiple sex partners while women who want children need a
more last-
ing and secure relationship in order to raise a family. Those of
us who
remained single also wanted multiple sex partners. Our efforts
to expand
25PORN WARS
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 25 11/14/12 2:24 PM
the idea of feminist sex were censored by mainstream feminists
and the
media at every turn.
The night of my first S/M meeting, I entered the small
apartment and
as I looked around the room, I didn’t see one familiar face
among these
younger women. My internal dialogue was like a broken record:
“They’re
probably all lesbian separatists and the minute they find out I’m
bisexual,
they won’t let me join.” I’d been discriminated against so many
times in
the past that the chip on my shoulder weighed heavily. As I sat
there
wallowing in my anticipated rejection, I visually fell into lust
with every
woman there. What a marvelous variety from stone butch to
lipstick les-
bians. When the meeting began, each woman introduced herself,
then

37. stated whether she was dominant or submissive, and said a few
words
about how she liked to play. The closer they got to me, the
faster the
butterflies in my belly fluttered. When all eyes were on me, I
defensively
said, “I’m a bisexual lesbian who’s into self-inflicted pleasure!”
Several women smiled. One asked how I inflicted my pleasure,
and
when I said it was with an electric vibrator, the room broke up
laughing.
A group of lesbian and bisexual feminists who were willing to
explore
kinky sex was my fondest dream come true and within no time,
I was
right at home.
Gradually I began to understand that all forms of sex were an
exchange of power, whether it was conscious or unconscious.
My focus
had been on the pleasure in sex, not the power. The basic
principle of
S/M was that all sexual activity between one or more adults had
to be
consensual and required a verbal negotiation, followed by an
agreement
between the players. All my years of romantic sex, when we
tried to read
each other’s minds, were basically nonconsensual sex. Romantic
love
is one of the most damaging concepts on the planet for
women—little
girls raised on Disney’s Sleeping Beauty are taught to wait for a
prince to
awaken them.

38. By the time I was in my midthirties and sport fucking, I learned
to
take control and be a top as a means of getting what I wanted.
But none
of these sexual activities were ever discussed or agreed upon
openly. As I
looked at sexuality in terms of this power dynamic, it felt like I
was wak-
ing from a deep sleep.
That spring, Dorothy, the founding mother of our group, invited
me
to join her at a conference organized by Women Against
Pornography
(WAP). Her commitment to feminism was contagious and she
was aware
of all the current happenings in the movement. By then I had
dropped
out of feminism so I was learning a lot from Dorothy, a thirty-
year-old
radical lesbian who had been trashed by other feminists because
of her
BETTY DODSON26
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 26 11/14/12 2:24 PM
S/M sexual preferences. As a post-menopausal hedonist in my
fifties, I
looked forward to my first public feminist forum dressed as a
leather
dyke.

39. The two of us trooped into the WAP conference arm in arm,
wearing
boots and jeans with large silver studded belts under our black
leather
jackets—high-visibility leather dykes sitting in the front row
just to the
left of the podium. The women glared at us, signaling that we
were out
of place, while we wore our political incorrectness like a badge
of honor.
At the time, I had difficulty taking this group seriously. After
femi-
nists had fought against censoring information about birth
control,
abortion, sexuality, and lesbianism, the idea that there was now
a group
that wanted to censor pornography seemed absurd. Surely WAP
was
only a small percentage of feminists, but Dorothy said they
were gain-
ing strength and growing in numbers. Ms. magazine had
contributed
money to WAP, and under pressure from members, NOW
(National
Organization for Women) had approved a resolution that
condemned
pornography without defining it. Several local NOW chapters
actively
supported WAP. Censorship was coiled like a rattlesnake ready
to strike
at our freedom and poison people’s enjoyment of masturbating
while
looking at pictures of sex. Unbelievable!
The large meeting room at NYU was packed with women only—

40. nearly a thousand had assembled. A red cloth banner with big
black
letters stretched across the back of the stage: WOMEN
AGAINST PORNOG-
RAPHY. That had to cost a pretty penny. There was also a first-
rate sound
system, along with expensive printed flyers—all done very
profession-
ally. This was no makeshift feminist conference where we had
mimeo-
graphed handouts. Dorothy leaned in close and asked, “When
have you
ever seen a conference dealing with women’s issues that had
this kind
of money behind it?” We both agreed that WAP most likely had
been
secretly funded by the CIA, the Christian Right, or both. The
Good Old
Boys were setting us up again—divide and conquer!
Drifting into a reverie, I thought about the 1973 NOW Sexuality
Conference. I remembered how brave we’d been, questioning
sex roles
and sexual taboos, exploring female sexual pleasure, and daring
to create
better sex lives for women with information and education.
We’d been so
sex positive and filled with excitement that we would change
the world.
How, in just ten short years, could we have ended up against
pornog-
raphy, which put feminists in the same bed as Christians
preaching the
gospel?
The WAP conference featured many speakers. Each gave a

41. brief, per-featured many speakers. Each gave a brief, per-
sonal history, and nearly every one had a horror story of sexual
abuse at
27PORN WARS
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 27 11/14/12 2:24 PM
the hands of a father, brother, husband, lover, or boss. There
were stories
of rape, battered wives, child abuse, harassment, and forced
prostitution.
Dorothy was busy taking notes while I sat there stunned by the
realiza-
tion that I was in the midst of an orgy of suffering, angry
women. Each
speaker’s words and tears were firing up the group into a
unified rage.
Emotionalism without intellect from victims without power was
how
lynch mobs and nationwide hate groups were formed—the basic
strat-
egy of fascism, I concluded with a shiver.
It saddened me to hear how these women had suffered, and I
would
never deny that their pain was real. For most of them, sex had
truly been
a misery or a violent trauma. No sane person was for rape or
incest, but
this one-dimensional attack on images of sex was totally
unacceptable.
Blaming pornography as the sole cause of women’s sexual
problems was

42. ludicrous. Why weren’t they going after big problems like war,
poverty,
organized religion, and sexual ignorance due to the total
absence of
decent sex education in our school system?
An attractive blonde in her midthirties stood at the mic. With
her
rage barely controlled, she described her childhood sexual
abuse. Every
Saturday when her mother pulled out of the driveway to do the
grocery
shopping, her father got out his “disgusting, filthy pictures” and
forced
her to perform an “unnatural act.” She didn’t say what it was,
but the
audience was surely fantasizing an adult penis penetrating an
eleven-
year-old girl. The whole room was emotionally whipped up into
a rage
with their own private images of child rape, while at the same
time, rev-
eling in the awfulness of it.
The speaker went on to blame the entire incident on
pornography!
There was no mention of society’s denial of sexual expression,
especially
masturbation. Maybe the father was a devout Catholic who
knew he’d
go to hell if he took hold of his own penis. How about the
nuclear fam-
ily taking some of the blame with its restrictive sexual mores?
But none
of these other possibilities occurred to her. She was adamant
that “dirty

43. pictures” had been the sole cause of her incest.
The WAP meeting ended with an open mic session, and within
moments, emotional chaos broke loose. Women were crying and
screaming hysterically, so we got out fast. Once outside, we
took a deep
breath to release our own tension. We both felt drained.
Although we
disagreed with WAP, they had a right to their opinions even
though they
didn’t respect our rights. We remained sexual outlaws.
The 1980s also ushered in AIDS, and the Reagan government
was
slow to respond to this looming crisis. How perfect: AIDS
ended casual
sex and sent the population back into committed relationships
and
BETTY DODSON28
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 28 11/14/12 2:24 PM
monogamy—the glue that binds. Child sexual abuse was
rampant and
getting national attention, while no one paid any attention to
how pov-
erty was really hurting our kids. Finally women were being
heard, but it
was only half the conversation. We were not getting ahead by
avoiding
central issues—and we certainly were not liberating our
sexualities.

44. During this time, women showed up at my workshops and broke
down in tears as they began to talk about being sexually abused.
Each
time, I would ask them to leave, with the explanation that my
groups
were about exploring pleasure, not sexual abuse. They needed to
see a
therapist and then come back for a Bodysex Workshop later on.
Some
women accused me of having a hard heart, but I simply stayed
on mis-
sion of liberating women’s independent orgasms so we could
come back
to life—actually and fully.
My Bodysex Workshops were well received, so I decided to
film one.
You just can’t beat the moving image; it’s an opportunity to
give people
images of what sex might be. The best way for us to learn is to
find out
what’s going on with everyone else. My girlfriend and I used a
home
video camera, and it took me two years to edit it on two clunky
tape
decks. My films were automatically labeled porn, because if you
see a
pussy or a penis, it’s porn. But you can’t teach sex without
getting explicit,
so, again, I found myself embracing the role of pornographer.
Before the Internet, every time I said “masturbation,” it either
sent
folks into gales of laughter or provoked embarrassed looks as
they
quickly changed the subject. My articles for magazines were

45. canceled
and interviews for television ended up on the cutting room
floor. The
bottom line of sexual repression is the prohibition of childhood
mastur-
bation. This humble activity is the basis for all of human
sexuality. The
Internet was the first place in my long career that I was not
censored.
My old lover Grant ran my first website. At the end, he was
classified
as legally blind, and held a magnifying glass, with his nose an
inch from
the screen. When I joined forces with law school grad and cyber
geek
Carlin Ross, we created a new website. I believe that once Grant
met
Carlin, he was able to leave his disintegrating body. He made it
to his
eighty-sixth birthday and died proud with his boots on, with the
next
upload for my website sitting on his hard drive. I miss him
terribly to this
day. We had the most passionate love/hate affair of the century.
Carlin and I offer free, accessible sex information, both visual
and
written, to women and men. We call the clips where we show
sexual
skills, “The New Porn.” Sex education must be entertaining, not
aca-
demic, dry, boring, or stilted. I’m not afraid of the word porn. If
people
29PORN WARS

46. Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 29 11/14/12 2:24 PM
are going to call my explicit sex education porn, then I say
embrace the
word. Be the new porn, be the porn you want to see. While it’s
true that
a lot of pornography out there is shitty for the most part, it still
works:
it gets people hot. The biggest turn on for me is to have a fully
orgasmic
partner, not someone pretending or playing. We all know the
real deal
when it’s happening—authentic orgasms are unmistakable. I’m
a sex-
positive feminist, liberating women one orgasm at a time.
Our site represents a new feminist sexual politics that’s well
beyond
any victimhood of rape and sexual abuse. We represent
orgasmic
feminism—a new movement of women who have taken control
of our
sex lives, and who dare to design them in any way we choose
whether
we’re straight, bi, lesbian, or a combination, and we can enjoy
our bodies
in any way we desire.
Recently, I love answering sex questions for free from all kinds
of
young, middle-aged, and older women, as well as boys and men.
I’m
learning about the concerns and sexual problems of Americans

47. and
people from around the world. Let me tell you: sexuality is in a
lot of
trouble. Young women today do not know what, when, where,
or how to
have an orgasm. Many of them have grown up without
childhood mas-
turbation, thanks to the growing influence of religion and the
censor-
ship of sexual information. Without access to proper sexual
information,
porn has been their primary form of sex education. The issue
here is that
the most readily available porn is basically entertainment for
men. One
young woman said she was sure she’d never had an orgasm
because she’d
never ejaculated. Unfortunately, the G-spot has become the new
name
for vaginal orgasms. It’s unfortunate because a very small
percentage of
women squirt when they experience an orgasm. I wrote my first
book
to help those few women know that this response was natural.
Now we
have a nation of young women trying to learn how to ejaculate.
Well-meaning friends suggest that I should drop the word
“feminist,”
and perhaps the entire concept, because feminism is so “old
hat.” Young
women today have lost interest in feminism because they
believe it’s
antisex and that all feminists are man haters. Let me tell you
something,
girlfriends. That’s exactly what the powers-that-be want us to

48. think and
do. Feminism has become a dirty word, and I want to save it, to
revive it.
I want feminism to signify a woman who knows what she wants
in bed
and gets it. Guys will be saying, “I’ve got to find me a feminist
to fuck!”
At eighty-two, I’ve decided to make a documentary based on the
Bodysex Workshops. In a sense, I’m going back to the
beginning, to
document the heart of my work. The all-women’s masturbation
circle is
BETTY DODSON30
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 30 11/14/12 2:24 PM
my sewing circle. “How do you feel about your body and your
orgasm?”
is a question still worth asking and the resulting conversation is
one still
worth having. We are there to listen to and honor each woman’s
personal
story. We celebrate our independent orgasms without a partner
or with
one.
This time around, it will be captured professionally with a film
crew
and better quality lighting and sound. I want to document this
with the
esteem it deserves, so I can leave the planet happy in the
knowledge

49. that this incredible workshop, designed by the early women who
first
attended, will be captured for all to see. It will be my most
brilliant work
of art, my Sistine Chapel. Now I have to have the courage to be
an old
Crone on film. I’m willing to set an example for seniors who are
giving
up on sex way too soon. After all, my ageing body can still see,
hear, eat,
drink, laugh, talk, walk, sing, dance, shit, masturbate, fuck,
create, draw,
write, and have orgasms!
In my heart, I believe that women and girls will not be self-
motivated
and self-possessed if they cannot give themselves orgasms. If
they rely on
someone else for sexual pleasure, they are potential victims of
whatever
society is pushing as “normal.” Masturbation is a meditation on
self-love.
It is essential. Sex-positive feminism is alive and well and we
will change
the world. It’s just going to take a bit longer than expected.
Viva la Vulva!
31PORN WARS
Feminist_Porn_v3.indd 31 11/14/12 2:24 PM
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Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory
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Pornographic encounters and interpretative
interventions: Vanessa del Rio: Fifty Years of
Slightly Slutty Behavior
Juana María Rodríguez
To cite this article: Juana María Rodríguez (2015) Pornographic
encounters and interpretative
interventions: Vanessa del Rio: Fifty Years of Slightly Slutty
Behavior, Women & Performance: a
journal of feminist theory, 25:3, 315-335, DOI:
10.1080/0740770X.2015.1124669
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Pornographic encounters and interpretative interventions:
Vanessa del
Rio: Fifty Years of Slightly Slutty Behavior
Juana María Rodríguez*
Gender and Women’s Studies & Performance Studies,
University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley,
CA, United States of America
Using the auto/biography, Vanessa del Rio: Fifty Years of
Slightly Slutty Behavior
as the primary text, this paper investigates how an embodied
understanding of
race and class alters our understanding of gendered experiences
of violence

52. and pleasure. It asks: what happens when the life experiences of
an aging
Afro-Latina porn star are positioned at the very heart of
feminist investigations
into the relationship between sexual experience and knowledge
production? In
the process, this paper reflects on how images and text function
as complicated
triggers for the attachments, identifications, desires, and
traumas of our own
corporeal embodiments and sexual histories.
Keywords: pornography; Latina; sexuality; sexual violence;
auto/biography;
sexual pleasure; masochism
The book Vanessa del Rio: Fifty Years of Slightly Slutty
Behavior (2010), defies understand-
ings of literary genres and racialized sexualities, demanding the
kind of lingering in uncer-
tainty that latinidad itself registers.1 This chronicle of the life
of an Afro-Latina adult-film
icon simultaneously intimates and distorts the conventions of
autobiography, documentary,
testimonio, and pornography to unsettle assumptions about
Latina sexuality and feminist
interpretive practices. It is a mammoth tome, weighing in at
over six pounds and containing
326 glossy pages.2 It includes images from adult magazines,
movie posters, films, and
photographs from her private collection; text transcribed from
interviews conducted both
on and off camera; memorabilia spanning her childhood to the
present day; and a 140-
minute DVD that includes an on-camera interview, a few “day-
in-the-life” scenes that

53. follow the contemporary Vanessa del Rio through the streets of
her New York, and numer-
ous clips from her many pornographic films.
Whether or not the name Vanessa del Rio is familiar to you, it
already registers a certain
proximity to the worlds in which race and pornography
intersect.3 The only child of a Puerto
Rican mother and a philandering Afro-Cuban father, Vanessa
was born Ana María Sanchez
on 31 March 1952. She grew up on 111th Street in Harlem and
attended Catholic school
before leaving home in her teens to venture out into the New
York City of the 1970s, a
© 2016 Women & Performance Project Inc.
*Email: [email protected]
Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 2015
Vol. 25, No. 3, 315–335,
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0740770X.2015.1124669
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http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2867-4520
mailto:[email protected]
http://www.tandfonline.com
world flavored with all the possibilities that sexual liberation,
civil rights, and drugs seemed to
promise. Vanessa del Rio was and is huge – legendary even –
not because she starred in many
films (the pervasive racism of the film industry meant she rarely
received top billing) but
because in the world of adult entertainment, during the golden
age of pornography,
Vanessa del Rio was a star. Black, Latina, and always
glamorous, she was dubbed “our
Marilyn” by her many Uptown fans. While a few African-
American, Asian, and Latino
men and women passed through these early years of the porn
industry, none developed the
name recognition of Vanessa del Rio. Del Rio worked steadily
in pornographic films from
1974 until 1985, appearing in over 100 films, yet she was rarely
offered starring roles,
playing instead the maid, the hooker, or the Latina spitfire, her
racialized difference
feeding seemingly endless appetites for forbidden fruit.4
Despite the roles she was offered,
del Rio always brought her own brand of Latina glamour to the
racial caricatures she was

56. paid to play: lips and nails done in crimson red, makeup always
flawless, cleavage and
shoes always poised to attract attention, attesting to Marcia
Ochoa’s assertion that
“glamour allows its practitioners to conjure a contingent space
of being and belonging”
(2014, 89). In every role she was given, del Rio performed star,
even before she was one,
conjuring an alternate universe in which a young Afro-Latina
from Harlem could become
an international porn sensation. Before retiring from adult films
in 1985 in response to her
own fears of AIDS, her fame was undisputed and she did a
series of pornographic films in
which she simply played herself.5 After her retirement, many of
her previous performances
began to be edited together and reissued as compilations, and
previous films were retitled
to profit from her popularity.6 Today she hosts her own X-rated
porn site and e-Bay site spe-
cializing in signed collectibles. As a public figure, she
frequently appears at adult conventions
to sign photos and books and has also appeared in minor
television roles and in a few hip-hop
music videos. And 30 years after she last appeared in an adult
feature, she remains an icon. 7
This paper, however is not about the history of racialized
pornography or an analysis of
how race, gender, and sexuality come together in these films: I
will leave those invaluable aca-
demic efforts in the capable hands of scholars like Mireille
Miller-Young (2014), author of A
Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women in Pornography, or
Jennifer Nash’s (2014) imprint The
Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography.8

57. Instead, I am interested in
older, less precise questions that have preoccupied feminist
academics for generations:
How do we understand experience? How does an embodied
understanding of race, sexuality,
and gender as performative practices alter what we might know
about experience, and how
does an engagement with aesthetics complicate how we might
feel about it? More to the
point, what happens when the life experiences of an aging
bisexual Afro-Latina porn star
are positioned at the very heart of feminist investigations into
the relationship between experi-
ence and knowledge production? Unlike other textual accounts
of life stories, or cinematic
biographical recreations, here the graphic presence of the
contemporary speaking subject
imposes its own interpretive power through the visualization of
documentary. But in combin-
ing biographical documentary with pornography, something else
is also ignited.
Testimonio, documentary, porn
It is well understood that visual images have the uncanny ability
to transfer affect, from the
moment of their production to the moment of their reception. In
the pornographic image,
316 J.M. Rodríguez
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when what is depicted is sex, that affective charge is activated
through its encounter with
our own sexual archives of feeling. In this essay, I want to
allow a space to register what
that affective difference might open up or foreclose, not about
the text per se but about
the very act of interpretation. Thinking experience through
queer latinidad, through the
life story of a porn star, through the shifting textual,
photographic, and cinematic traces
of racialized sexuality, accentuates the buried tensions between
lived experiences and the
theories we might use to account for them. Equally as
intimidating, it requires that we
acknowledge how our own racialized archives of feeling, of
gendered embodiment, and
sexualized attachments animate and unsettle our scholarly
practices.

60. It was these questions that led me to a consideration of
testimonio as an analytical lens,
that hybridized genre that captures elements of the legal
discourse of testimony, the African
American tradition of testifying, and the particularly Latin
American genre of life story as
evidence in the public claim for human rights.9 Reading Fifty
Years as testimonio makes
salient the racialized sexual politics that undergird del Rio’s
story, as it illuminates
aspects of the text that complicate an already complicated
genre. Following John Beverly’s
foundational work on testimonio, we might argue that as a
woman of color in the sex indus-
try – in addition to appearing in pornographic films, del Rio
also worked as a stripper,
escort, and streetwalker – her life story exists at the margins of
literature, excluded from
authorized representations of Latina sexuality. Her sex-laden
text certainly functions as
an “extraliterary or even antiliterary form of discourse”
(Beverly 1993, 84). Furthermore,
like other notable testimonios, del Rio could be said to use her
life story to promote a
fuller understanding of a community and a history that has been
erased from public dis-
course, to make a claim for the human rights of sex workers.
And her text is replete with
instances of sexual violence, police harassment, and abuse that
evidence this as an
urgent political project. Like many working in the various
sectors of the sex industry, in
this text del Rio recounts the numerous times she was arrested
and jailed, and speaks of
the hypocrisy, futility, and harm of laws that criminalize

61. consensual adult sex work.10
Similar to other testimonios, del Rio’s life story is narrated in
the familiar “as told to”
format. However, rather than an anthropologist or an
enlightened intellectual, the inter-
viewer, editor, and transcriber in this case, Dian Hanson, is
herself a longtime regular in
the adult-publishing world, having worked not only as an
actress in adult films, but also
as the editor of such titles as Juggs and Big Butt magazines and
now as the editor for
Taschen’s Sexy Books series. Taschen, a German publisher that
specializes in art, architec-
ture, and pop culture is best known for producing over-sized
collector-edition volumes by
such notable photographers as Annie Leibovitz and Helmut
Newton, and coffee-table stan-
dards of French Impressionists, and mid-century design. Their
Sexy Books catalogue speaks
to the mainstreaming of pornography and includes books on
Tom of Finland (Hanson 2009),
Japanese bondage, and the Big Book of Breasts (Hanson 2011),
which comes complete with
3-D glasses. This framing within the world of publishing
situates del Rio’s text, not as tes-
timonio or even autobiography, but as art, as visual object, as
living-room adornment. Here,
rather than 3-D glasses, the 140-minute DVD included with 50
Years (Figure 1) functions as
its special marketing feature that augments the static
photographic images of the text.
Like some other Taschen art books, Vanessa del Rio: Fifty
Years of Slightly Slutty Be-
havior is available in multiple formats: a trade version that sells

62. for US$59.99, and two
limited-edition formats, one that retails for US$700, and
another that goes for an astounding
Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 317
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US$1800 and includes a signed print and a chance to spend an
evening with the star herself.
All include over 300 glossy, image-rich pages documenting
Vanessa’s life on and off
screen. The book and the DVD cover much of the same material,
and many of the taped
interviews are unfaithfully transcribed in the book, revealing

64. the seams of post-production
editing.11 In both, del Rio narrates her childhood as a young
Latina growing up in Harlem,
her life in the white-dominated adult-film industry, and her
current career as a pop-culture
icon. And both contain sizable chunks of what can only be
described as hardcore pornogra-
phy. Unapologetically sexual, over the course of the project del
Rio describes the countless
adventures and misadventures of her life in the sex industry.
She also opines on how to
deliver a great blowjob, the current state of the porn industry,
and the hypocrisy of the
Catholic Church. What remains constant throughout the text is
del Rio’s unfaltering
investment in shaping the interpretation of her life story,
particularly with regards to her
sexual agency.
Figure 1. Book Cover with sticker announcing “140-min DVD.”
318 J.M. Rodríguez
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Authorizing subjects
In 50 Years of Slightly Slutty Behavior, del Rio is presented as
both a visual object, whose
body and sexuality is available for our ocular consumption, and
as an authorizing subject,
who is enlisted to interpret the narratives she herself provides.
These shifts between one
kind of visual encounter – porn, and another – the speaking
subject of documentary,
require that viewers who might wish to revel unproblematically
in the pornographic gaze
bear witness to the stories of racism, violence, criminalization,
and racialized feminine
desire that also form part of the narrative.12 Equally as
important from a feminist-studies
perspective, it requires those interested in accessing the
biographical details of this Afro-
Latina icon to confront the explicit rawness of the pornographic
image, and del Rio’s
own accounts of herself. In many ways, the DVD and the
pervasive technology of
digital capture wholly undercuts the genre of testimonio; no
longer is the imagined “voice-
less” subject of testimonio dependent on a literate intermediary
to convey their message to

67. the larger public. Like Subcomandante Marcos, like protesters
in Greece, Ferguson, or
Iguala, Mexico those wishing to broadcast their stories to a
global audience just need to
upload their “truth” onto YouTube, and the more sophisticated
cinematic genre of docu-
mentary, made possible in part by technological access, is
increasingly becoming a
central feature of how we learn about the world. Nevertheless,
today as publics are inun-
dated with the visual packaging of life stories in reality
television, tell-all biographies,
and cinematic political propaganda, the imagined veracity of
biographical documentary,
like that of its textual counterpart, is rarely accepted as a given,
understood instead as a cul-
tural product mediated and designed to construct a narrative out
of the “real,” to frame
experience in the shape of meaning.
In many ways, Vanessa del Rio personifies the aggressive
racialized woman who sees
something or someone and goes for it, an image she is invested
in controlling and promot-
ing – even now. Several times throughout the book, she credits
Isabel Sarli (Figure 2), the
Argentinean actress of the 1950s and 1960s, as being an early
influence on her, and
describes seeing Sarli’s Spanish-language movies on 42nd
Street with her mother.13 She
writes:
Sarli’s films sometimes ended tragically, but I think I
consciously didn’t pay too much atten-
tion to the ends of the film, I was admiring the sin … I was
liking her power and daring, the life

68. that that represented, her confidence in her sexuality, and to be
able to use it, to be that type of
woman, to be all woman. (28)
In Vanessa’s retelling, rather than Latina sexuality being
shrouded in Catholic propriety and
sexual repression, she narrates growing up surrounded by
culturally authorized perform-
ances of a Latina hyper-sexuality, gender performances that
were foundational to her
self-fashioning. Moreover, this passage makes clear her early
innate understanding of
gender as performance, and sexuality as a self-styled instrument
of power. She goes on
to say:
[W]atching Fuego, a movie I originally saw when I was 16, I
thought how most people don’t
want to accept all aspects of woman, they just want to praise the
Madonna, the mother, and not
explore the slut. … I like the word slut. It is a strong word for
women who embrace their sexu-
ality and refuse to be sexually controlled. (28)
Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 319
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For del Rio, embracing sexuality and refusing to be sexually
controlled becomes a way to
counter the standard formula of victimhood and recovery that is
so prevalent in tell-all bio-
graphies of retired Anglo porn stars like Linda Lovelace, Jenna
Jameson, Traci Lorde, and
Jennie Ketcham.14 Keenly aware of how others have been able
to profit by fulfilling narra-
tive desires for confession and redemption, del Rio seems to
hold those who claim they
“only did it for the money” in particular disdain.
As a genre, the biographies of porn stars tend to traffic in sad
stories of teenage sexual
abuse and addiction and when, and if, they survive to tell the
tale themselves, generally end
with the triumph of true love. For example, the Publisher’s
Weekly review of Jenna Jame-
son’s New York Times best-seller How to Make Love Like a
Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale,
claims: “Beneath Jameson’s monstrous diva exterior, however,
was a girl who just wanted
to become a loving mother and wife. After many failures, she

71. finally succeeded, and her X-
rated book ends on an uplifting family-values note” (Strauss
2014). Without a hint of irony,
in Jameson’s text, rather than chapter titles, each section is
divided into books with Roman
numerals, preceded by an epigraph from a Shakespearean
sonnet. Here we see how white-
ness, particularly when paired with motherhood, works to
authenticate narratives of
redemption and romance even as it facilitates the mainstreaming
of pornography. In con-
trast, del Rio refuses to cast herself as a victim of the porn
industry or of life, and reiterates
her sense of control and sexual agency throughout the book. But
she is invested in asserting
more than her agency; what del Rio seems most intent in
describing is her pleasure, the
Figure 2. Isabel Sarli.
320 J.M. Rodríguez
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sheer joy and satisfaction of her many sexual escapades. She
clearly avows, “I like sex, I
have always liked sex; and I will never deny liking sex” (28),
and throughout the text,
she narrates an almost insatiable appetite for sexual adventure.
A story that seems emblematic of this attitude takes place when
responding to a question
about her first performance in an adult film wherein she
describes her nervousness, not
about having sex on camera, but about saying her lines
correctly. Part way through the
on-camera interview, she interrupts herself, turns to us, her
viewers, and blurts out: “And
I blew the cameraman! During a break!” At this point in the
interview, she begins to
laugh uncontrollably, finally adding, “In those days everybody
just had a good ol’time”
(DVD min. 31). Blowing the cameraman, in this story as in
others, becomes a way for
her to assert that sex was not just something she did for money:
it was something she
did for fun.15
Refusing victim
The structure of the book, chapters that are not quite

74. chronological, and not quite thematic,
suggest that the editor – Dian Hanson – tried as best she could
to group hours of filmed
interview material into some sort of narrative shape. For
example, a chapter entitled
“Chicka Chicka Boom” is devoted to her discussion of how
racial politics informed del
Rio’s career in the adult-film industry, one aspect of the porn
industry she is not shy
about critiquing. Another chapter, “Gym Rat,” is devoted to a
brief period where she left
porn, took steroids, and began a career as a body builder. Even
as this project with Dian
Hansen and Taschen is another attempt to reinvigorate her brand
– the book is dedicated
“To My Fans, May I Always Be Your Mistress of Masturbatory
Memories” – and turn a
profit doing it, it is also an opportunity to demonstrate her
control of her public image,
to control how she will be remembered. Unlike most “as told to”
print autobiographies,
the addition of on-screen interviews allows the consumer of
these narratives to see the
subject speaking on camera. We get not just her story but the
performance of her story;
we are able to see her laugh and gesture and several times, turn
away from Hansen to
address us, the audience, directly. Not only does she insist on
telling her story her way,
she also insists on interpreting it within her own frame of
understanding. And it is this
element that I ultimately found most provocative about the text
and most challenging as
a critic.
Throughout the recorded interview and repeated throughout the

75. text, she continually
insists that she never really had any “bad” experiences sexually,
stating: “I really
enjoyed my life, I never did anything that I didn’t want to do
where I wasn’t in on
it, even if I felt it was something that I had to do, I would
always find someway to
be in on it. I would never let myself become the victim or feel
victimized” (DVD
min. 13). The book does not shy away from describing the many
forms of violation
and victimization that impact the lives of women, people of
color, and sex workers,
and del Rio acknowledges she is grateful she never got “sucked
in” and “spit out,”
but she also distinguishes that from feeling like a victim (DVD
min. 23). Del Rio’s
refusal of the term victim marks an important interpretive
intervention into dominant
narratives that cast the subjects of gendered violence as
perpetual, de facto, ahistorical
victims.
Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 321
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In juridical discourse, the term victim operates within the
binary poles of guilt and inno-
cence, victim and victimizer, setting the foundation for
reparations and punishment. But the
term also contains other meanings that surface in its
deployment, a religious reference to
sacrifice that is linked to salvation, and another that defines it
as “one who is reduced or
destined to suffer some oppressive or destructive agency”
(O.E.D.). The Anishinaabe
scholar Gerald Vizenor’s term “survivance” provides an apt
meditation to help elucidate
del Rio’s discomfort with the term victim. He writes:
“Survivance is an active sense of pres-
ence, the continuance of native stories, not a mere reaction, or a
survivable name. Native
survivance stories are renunciations of dominance, tragedy and
victimry” (1994, iii).
Like the indigenous populations of North America and
elsewhere, sex workers are most
often narratively depicted as the perpetual victims of patriarchal
power, damaged beyond
repair, even as liberal politics plot their salvation. In contrast,
Vizenor’s term survivance

78. brings together the resilience of survival as resistance, as it
insists on acknowledging pres-
ence in the face of societal demands for disappearance.
Del Rio’s repeated insistence on not wanting to be cast as a
victim functions to repudiate
some feminist critiques of those that work in the porn industry
while refusing salvation or
erasure. But survival and resistance have also come to function
as familiar and expected
narrative tropes in feminist scholarship on sexuality, eliding the
more complicated and
vexed question of how pleasure might endure. Nicole Fleetwood
makes this point most
powerfully in her essay “The Case of Rihanna: Erotic Violence
and Black Female
Desire,” when she asserts that “black women are brought into
dominant narrative folds
as victims of unbearable suffering” (2012, 422) and she urges
cultural critics to probe pos-
sibilities for black sexual practices that are not framed through
dominant frameworks of suf-
fering, resistance, or exploitation” (2012, 422). Jennifer Nash in
her work on race and
pornography similarly argues against what she terms the “twin
logics of injury and recovery
which make theorizing black female pleasure from within the
parameters of the [porno-
graphic] archive a kind of impossibility” (2014, 25–26). These
African American feminist
scholars echo del Rio in their refusal to elide questions of black
female pleasure, and it is
this resolute determination to assert possibilities for pleasure
that functions as del Rio’s
ongoing retort to her imagined feminist critics. She declares:
“Some feminists have said,

79. ‘Wasn’t that exploitation?’ And I’d say, ‘No, that was my
pleasure’” (84). But del Rio’s
insistence on not being perceived as a victim can also be read as
her demand that she be
recognized as an authorial agent, capable of not only narrating
her life but determining
its significance.
Many of the stories in the book are those you might expect from
a porn star, her on-
screen accomplishments (she claims the distinction of having
filmed the first double pen-
etration in porn); her frustration at being continually typecast as
the ethnic Other to the
blondes who received top billing and top salaries; and her early
days in an industry that
was just starting to explode with cross-over films like Deep
Throat (1972) and The Devil
in Miss Jones (1973). But del Rio’s book also recounts stories
that are considerably
more disturbing, if also equally commonplace, stories that too
often constitute the sad
stuff of the everyday for many women of color. In del Rio’s
narrative the lecherous
uncle, the manipulative boyfriend, the abusive police officer –
all make routine appear-
ances. The familiarity of these tales is itself unsettling.
However, rather than recount
these stories through the language of victimhood and trauma,
del Rio narrates them with
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almost comic nonchalance, as another obstacle to overcome,
another futile attempt to make
her feel less than whole, as another testament of survivance.
This repeated insistence on narrating everyday forms of trauma
without recourse to
“fixing” in the Fanonian sense, subjects as traumatized victims,
reorients feminist sexual poli-
tics away from gendered norms of protected white womanhood,
positioning those of us that
have been violated, colonized, abused, harmed, and exploited at
the very heart of feminist
politics, as the norm of what constitutes a gendered
experience.16 For Latinas, these everyday
violations include the nefarious modes through which our
sexuality is used to define and dis-

82. cipline the possibilities of our social worlds; the ways our
bodies and tongues – tinged by
colonial anxieties that mark us as both colonizer and colonized
– render our sexual counte-
nance as wholly excessive, yet always lacking; and the ways our
sex has been used to
shame us. Frances Negrón Muntaner situates the trope of shame
as foundational to the
ethnic, racial, and gendered identities of Puerto Ricans,
declaring:
[B]oricua bodies are persistently negotiating their shameful
constitution, refashioning the
looks that aim to humiliate or take joy away from them. At the
same time, it is impossible
to deny that our most vital cultural production as boricuas has
sprung not from the denial
of shame, but from its acknowledgement into wounds that we
can be touched by. (xviii)
Frequently in her narrative, del Rio asks readers to dwell in the
complicated, shameful erotic
registers that violence can sometimes instantiate, even as she
actively describes how the
lines between fantasy, reality, the narrative scripts of porn, and
her own intimate sexual
play melt into one another. Early on in the book, she recalls
being around 12 and
hearing her mother warn her of the dangers of the streets by
reading her newspaper articles
about young girls getting raped. Rather than instilling terror or
inspiring caution, although
perhaps this was also their impact, the young girl that grew up
to be Vanessa del Rio used
those stories as the narrative building blocks for her sexual
fantasies. She states:

83. There was a popular Spanish wrestler. … El Santo, [he] was the
masked good guy, but he
became tangled up in my fantasies. I developed scenarios about
being overpowered by
masked rapists based on his image, which I later played out
with my lover, Reb. (32)
Already in this moment of recounting her childhood, we witness
how the link between sex
and violence gets mined for its erotic potential, as she manages
to hold in tension the threat
of violence and possibility of pleasure.
Returning to Nicole Fleetwood’s pointed insights proves
invaluable here. Fleetwood
challenges what she terms “a coercive agenda” of “black
recuperative heterosexuality”
(2012, 422) to offer alternative forms of understanding erotic
attachments to violence
“that do not conform to dominant frameworks of exploitation, of
racial uplift and respect-
ability” and that are not predicated on narratives of
victimization or pathology. She writes:
How do cultural critics account for highly eroticized
attachments in black heterosexual intima-
cies that are hinged on the force of masculinized violence? In
moving the analysis of sexual
subjugation beyond the framework of fantasy, we need to
fashion analytic tools to examine
black women’s sexual practices where pleasure and attachment
are interwoven with the
threat or reality of physical harm. (421)
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As Fleetwood suggests, moving the analysis beyond the
framework of fantasy complicates
our ability to come to terms with all the ways that as women of
color, violence gets multiply
coded into our sexual lives, and the ways domination and
abjection haunt the sexual ima-
ginary of racialized subjects. In Vanessa del Rio’s retelling of
her life, we see not just the
eroticization of violence and even terror, but we also witness
the possibility that some forms
of corporeal and psychic violence might come to function as
self-defined forms of sexual

86. pleasure.
Let me present another biographical scene that pushes the
boundaries of intelligibility
even further, well beyond fantasy. In another episode, del Rio
describes having to have sex
with a state trooper in order to get her boyfriend out of jail –
she begins telling the story by
explaining:
It was like the movies, where you have to put out to get your
boyfriend out of jail. And to the
extent that it was like the movies, there was something exciting
about it – plus he was hand-
some, blond, and ruggedly studly. (107)17
Once again del Rio returns to the images of sexuality that have
been projected on the silver
screen as a narrative filter through which to make sense of what
is happening in her real life.
And while the trope of “a good girl forced to do something
immoral to save the man she
loves” might be a familiar one in Hollywood, the story takes a
decidedly twisted turn
when she reveals that over the course of the exchange with the
officer she had an
orgasm. She goes on to exclaim:
It was so theatrical, such a humiliating adventure, that I have an
orgasm but I don’t let him
know because I don’t want to give him the satisfaction. I don’t
think he would have believed
it if he’d known, since this was supposed to be his power game
… . Ooh, I felt like such a dirty
girl for enjoying it! (107)18

87. In the filmed interview, she ends her account laughing, as if she
is keenly aware of the ironic
perversity of the juxtaposition of state coercion and her own
sexual gratification. At this
point the DVD cuts to a clip of one of her porn performances in
which she is playing an
inmate being forced to sexually accommodate her prison guard,
and we witness another,
much campier, representation of state sexual violence.
On one level this story seems ripped from the headlines about
the Oklahoma police
officer Daniel Holtzclaw who was convicted of raping and
sexually assaulting more than
a dozen Black women, some of whom were street-level
prostitutes, because he felt they
were unlikely to report his rape and abuse (Philipps 2015). And
both stories affirm
studies that document the relationship between the
criminalization of sex work, police
enforcement practices, and violence against those suspected of
being prostitutes. One
study goes as far as suggesting that “prior assault by police had
the strongest correlation
with both sexual and client perpetrated violence against female
sex workers” (Shannon
et al. 2009, 5). In fact, in her written account of this incident,
del Rio mentions that she
“thought he must have done this before because he just nodded
at the motel clerk and
drove straight to the room” (107). Sadly, sexual harassment and
assault of women imagined
to be prostitutes by police is a common-day occurrence, a direct
result of laws that crimi-
nalize sex work. Dark, Latina, and daring to occupy the public
sphere as a sexual being,

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Vanessa del Rio fit the racially gendered profile for prostitute,
even when she was not
engaged in sex work.
Even if the events are strikingly similar and equally horrific,
watching del Rio tell the
story onscreen feels different to me as spectator because of how
it is told. Sitting in her
living room, surrounded in leopard prints (“leopard” is her
favorite color), drinking wine

90. and telling story after story, her image on-screen assures the
viewer that she is just fine,
that she not only endured the violence of her youth but managed
to thrive (Figure 3).19
In recounting the story through the lens of mainstream cinema,
del Rio uses the narra-
tive familiarity as a way to normalize the violence, “where you
have to put out to get your
boyfriend out of jail.” But as the scene continues, she uses this
event to offer her rendering
of how she was able to assimilate this violation within the
interpretative framework of her
own world-view. “This is the kind of thing I mean, where I take
away but they don’t take
anything from me, I take from it” (DVD min. 1:14). Del Rio
regards this experience, not as
evidence of trauma, but as an act of revenge that is made
available to her through her ability
to access pleasure, a pleasure that includes both her orgasm and
her delight in hiding that
fact from her assailant. In making sense of her experience, as
one that is defined by coercion
but which also includes her ability to experience orgasm, she
attempts to rewrite the terms
under which sexual violence, resistance, and retribution are
understood.
As a critic, I return again and again to the axiom from Joan
Scott’s essay “The Evidence
of Experience”: “Experience is at once always already an
interpretation and something that
needs to be interpreted” (1993, 412). In that piece, Scott asks us
to do more than just include
other voices in our feminist formulations of experience; she
compels us to think about the

91. available frameworks of intelligibility that experience enters as
it comes into language.
Read through Scott, we can understand that del Rio’s account of
her experience already
implies a level of interpretation; it has already been framed by
the interpretive possibilities
available to her, including those offered by both mainstream
cinema and mainstream fem-
inism. Following Fleetwood and Nash, we also see how race
functions to censor the sexual
narratives of certain subjects, making some accounts
unspeakable. Yet for both the young
Afro-Latina who was stopped and assaulted by the police for no
apparent reason, and
present-day del Rio, the seasoned sex worker and porn star who
has lived in intimate proxi-
mity to sexual violence and is now looking back on that
moment, the interpretive possibi-
lities include her ability to access her own sexual pleasure and
script it as an act of sexual
subversion, even in the midst of a coercive encounter.
Furthermore, del Rio’s account of
herself exposes the ways the experiences of racialized subject
positions that are not
white, middle-class, or “respectable” are made illegible within
feminist frameworks that
fail to account for the possibility of pleasure in the sexual lives
of those who are constituted
by violence.
As a critic, I might be able to argue with her analysis of these
events, but in order to do
justice to del Rio’s version of this story, I also have to find a
way to make sense of the trace of
the real, of her laughter, of the materiality of her orgasm, and of
her desire to control the terms

92. under which intelligibility functions. In her essay, “Ruminations
on Lo Sucio as a Latino
Queer Analytic,” Deborah Vargas (2014) proposes lo sucio, as a
way to account for the
dirty sensory pleasures of non-normative sexualities of those
“deemed collateral genders
within a social world invested in the fiscal benefits of
normative sexual intimacies.” For
Vargas, lo sucio offers “a way to theorize the performative
tactics that genderqueer feminine
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94. sexualities enact to remain the magnificent refuse of surplus
while in refusal of vanishing.”
Even in the face of police violence that aims to subjugate and
dehumanize her, Vanessa
del Rio rebuffs efforts to reduce her experience to the narrative
tropes of normative hetero-
femininity or redemptive victimhood. She refuses to vanish, and
instead shamelessly relishes
the dirty, sensory, and performative excesses associated with la
puta, the slut, the whore.
Because Latinas come to sexuality through the multifarious
forms of violence brought
about through colonization, enslavement, migration, and the
wounds of public and private
patriarchy, scenes of violence, violation, and shame are core to
our understandings of sexual
subjectivity, kindling an explosion of diverse and divergent
affective responses. Each
response fashions its own meaning from the paradox of logic
and chaos that defines
cruelty, each functions as its own form of acknowledgement that
some glimmer of
self-love might outlive the harms. However, even as these
rejoinders to the extravagant
and quotidian harms that surround us can never fully redress the
injuries we have
endured, they serve to rupture any semblance of an appropriate,
rational response to the
logic of sexual and racial subjection that is intent on defining
our position in the world.
The Reb Stout affair
In a book that repeatedly asserts del Rio’s sense of control and
sexual agency, the inclusion

95. of one particular chapter stands out for the ways it complicates
narratives of how sexual
empowerment might be understood. Entitled the “Reb Stout
Affair,” it is devoted to a
Figure 3. Still from untitled Taschen DVD.
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seven-month affair with Reb Stout, a Los Angeles native and
S/M aficionado. Stout claimed
to have seven distinct personalities with male, female, and
genderqueer manifestations,

97. each with a distinct name, wardrobe, and sexual proclivities,
some quite dominant and
indeed sadistic, some wholly submissive. Curiously, no mention
of this period and no refer-
ence to these images occur in the DVD. And while the rest of
the book is full of glossy
movie posters and professional stills from her films and colorful
magazine spreads, the
photographs in this chapter are taken from the extensive
amateur photographic archive
Stout and del Rio produced during their time as lovers, images
that often include costumes,
wigs, ropes, whips, and assorted sexual paraphernalia. In the
introduction to this chapter
Hanson states, “every sexual encounter was captured on film,
including all the ecstasy,
terror and tears. It was love 1970s style and not for the faint of
heart” (163).
Figure 4. Source: Image courtesy of Reb Stout
Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 327
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