It was around 1970 and my boyfriend and I didn’t have enough money for the rent. We were living in Oakland, CA just across the Bay Bridge from San Francisco, which was emerging as the Porn Capital of the United States, as described in a January 1971 New York Times article. Aside from porn, the North Beach area of the city was a mecca for strippers, which is where I got my start, just down the street from the City Lights Bookstore. Dancing was a feminist statement for me, a declaration of my liberation from misogynistic values. Except it wasn’t and I was miserable.
Stepping off the stage, the last thing on my to-do list was be in a porn film, but my boyfriend had gambled away our rent falling for Five Card Monte on the street. Those were the days when porn provided the opportunity for many young people like us to earn quick money, to pay the landlord and eat. The audition was fully-clothed, a non-event. What I did, a loop, was the raunchy side of the business. Ten minutes, one and done. And even then the performance had to be dubbed. My boyfriend and our flat-mate (he also needed rent money) languished under the lights. Loops were the stock-in-trade of backroom video rental stores of the late 1960s and early 1970s when sex for sale was surging. Often you didn’t even have to buy the VHS, but you drew the curtain behind you, put change in a slot and watched on the spot. Who knows how many men witnessed my debut. Years later, when I began to explore the field of market-place sex, I was gone. After a momentary regret, I was thankful.
I became a card-carrying WAP (Women Against Pornography). Pornography didn’t merely reflect women’s subordination; it embodied the subordination. My objection was both moral and political. Along with the mainstream feminist movement I swallowed the misogynist message, and I condemned the women who worked in the adult industry or did other sex work. What was wrong with them? I’d never even seen a porn movie.
But then. But then I was reacquainted with porn through a friend. I thought I might be interest in writing about this because, after all, I had roots. I figured I’d better take a look.
Long story short, after I went to a memorial service for Candida Royalle the Grace Kelly of porn, attended by a bevy of porn actors, I was gob-smacked by how they so obviously loved themselves and were much more secure with their bodies and their sexuality then I ever was. There I discovered feminist pornography. Whoever imagined such a thing existed.
Porn infiltrated our living rooms with Stormy Daniels. Despite the creep toward more “porn-y” viewpoints about sex among the general population, Project 2025, the political initiative that is legislating Trump’s presidency, states “Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. … Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classified as registered sex offenders.” Do I smell a connection? And what about the customers?
Project 2025’s war on sex work aligns with an elevated crusade against women in the United States. The group #handsoffmyporn.com was created in response to Project 2025’s stated intention to outlaw pornography. Here’s what they have to say about women in porn: “Women in the adult industry are not victims. They are business women who enjoy their jobs, enjoy full autonomy over their bodies, and have built powerful brands.” Performers make a better living doing this line of work then what they’d be earning in many of the jobs typically slotted for them. How could I forget that I was paid the same amount–$50–as my male counterpart for the loop we made. Porn was an early portal for financial equity and independence for many. And here’s something else about porn: it’s permissive not in a free for all kind of way but by practicing acceptance. Transgenders play a big part in feminist porn. According to a recent executive order saying that grounded in an “incontrovertible reality,” there are only two sexes. Feminist pornographers know otherwise.
Still, I ask myself: Why? Why am I interested in this? Why am I writing about female sexuality and pleasure and not trees or monarch butterflies? Throughout the process I’ve been ambivalent. What’s behind my ambivalence? I came of age in the late 1960s when women were “given permission” to act on their sexuality and burned their bras. I made it my credo that I was going to fuck like a man–with whomever, whenever, uncommitted–and feel okay about it. Though I got off on my expressed freedom I’m not sure I actually got off in the process. I had more work to do.
Maybe two years ago I saw the movie, Good Luck to You, Leo Grande, about a recently widowed, 62-year–old retired religious education teacher who’s never had an orgasm and she hires a sex worker to fix that. Emma Thompson, who plays the widow (and was 63-years-old IRL), has a lot to say about her experience making the film. “I don’t think that attending to women’s pleasure, young or old, is at the top of anyone’s to-do list. … I had no idea how much I would learn about my attitude to my own body, to pleasure and to shame – how much I would laugh about the genuine silliness of so many of our responses to sexual pleasure, and how much I would cry about what is lost in life when it is repressed, ignored and punished.”
Why them and not me?
The feminist pornographers were on to something. I saw that when I went to Candida Royalle’s memorial service. Of course, as with most any profession, it wasn’t and isn’t all fun and games. But they got past the Do’s and Don’ts that stopped my foray into stripping–for feminism–and that weren’t any quieter as I desperately tried to look luscious beneath the camera lights. I even had another chance to prove my stuff a few years ago. I had an opportunity to be in a educational film featuring seniors showing their peers how to have good sex even when nothing seems to be working anymore. Apparently, that’s not my jam.
According to Melissa Febos “Sex, like any experience, is a lens through which we learn to see ourselves.” Pornography can become a vehicle to help us see and understand our own bodies and our sexuality, from a feminist perspective.” That’s my jam.
P.S. Here’s some data. Large studies suggest that the increased availability of pornography is associated with reduced sexual aggression; pornography can’t be blamed for bad behavior.
Your essay brought back memories of my college roommate who danced topless to pay tuition and rent. One evening, when I returned from my waitressing job, she had brought home a customer. Imagine my chagrin, and his, when the customer turned out to be my advanced colonial history professor.
Smart stuff. I appreciate the point of view. I was in SF/North Beach in 1969, but I never went to strip clubs. Too young, too broke. Still have never been. But watched some Mitchell Brothers movies. Anyhoo: your boyfriend lost all your money playing 3-card monte? Where was he from? Most city-smart kids as young as 12 know to never play. Most crooked game ever until Musk was given the keys to the U.S. treasury.