PORNOHEALING Pornography as a healing process for individuals with a history of sexual violence Master of Arts & Culture in Gender Studies Sotiria-Chrysovalanti (Sonia) Patrinou, 5919797 Thesis Supervisor: Gianmaria Colpani Second Reader: Jamila Mascat [Utrecht, 2017] Acknowledgements This thesis, required a lot of emotional effort in order to be composed. As a result, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to all of my interviewees, because they gave me the chance to be their audience and because through their stories I am also sharing mine. [1] Contents: 1. Introduction________________________________________________________3 2. Chapter 1: A Biography of Porn 1.1 Porn: The Golden Years________________________________________7 1.2 The Sex Wars and Beyond_____________________________________10 1.3 Pornography as a Healing Process_______________________________15 3. Chapter 2: Blue Filmography/ Pink Politics1 2.1 Too Much Pussy? Much More Pussy! ____________________________19 2.2 Silver Shoes________________________________________________22 2.3 Dirty Diaries_______________________________________________24 4. Chapter 3: Pornohealing: From Theory to Practice 3.1. Porn Taste: A Web-Based Survey_______________________________27 3.2 Interviews: Sharing Three Stories_______________________________34 5. Conclusion________________________________________________________39 6. Literature_________________________________________________________41 1 During the 1980's, pornographic content in video cassettes was sealed using a blue tape, hence people used to refer to pornographic films also as “blue films.” The title of this chapter is a play between the color blue, signifying erotic films, and pink (politics) as a reference to the feminist, ethical, and queer aspect of the films discussed in the second chapter. [2] Introduction It was almost two years ago, when I discovered a British project named “My Body Back.” This project offers to sexually assaulted women medical examination after the sexually violent incident they have faced and additionally, group therapy sessions in order to provide them with psychological support. Furthermore, every woman who desires to do it, can join Café V, which organizes seminars that assist women to learn how to appreciate their bodies again after traumatic violent experiences. Apart from all these useful and necessary activities, “My Body Back” also owns a pornographic database, which includes porn material addressed to women with a history of sexual violence, whether the violent incident was a harassment or an assault. This specific project is called “The Clit List” and as they state on their own website they provide information regarding “erotic media that might help them explore their sexual desires while staying informed about potential triggers.”2 I found this pornographic database remarkably interesting and innovating, as I was already interested in alternative uses and aspects of pornography. This project was troubling my mind for a long time, and as a result it laid the foundations of this MA research. Can pornography take the form of a healing process for individuals with a history of sexual violence? For my MA thesis, I aim to answer this research question by exploring alternative uses and aspects of pornography, and additionally focusing on porn as a healing process. My goal is to examine whether people who experienced sexual harassment(s) and/or assault(s) watch feminist, ethical or queer non-triggering porn films, like the ones included in “The Clit List,” so as to make themselves feel sexually aroused again after a traumatic event, redefine their approach to sexual activity in general, or just embrace body positivity. In the process of addressing that main research question, other sub-questions also emerged: do those women find mainstream porn to be triggering? do they search for feminist, ethical, or queer porn that is not triggering? And do they manage to find erotic material that they enjoy or is all the accessible material not satisfying? In order to answer these questions, I begin this pornographic journey by recalling in the first chapter the contemporary history of pornography; the etymological 2 For more information regarding the “My Body Back” project see: http://www.mybodybackproject.com/ (accessed June 25, 2017). [3] origin of the very term “pornography,” the golden era of porn, and the so-called sex wars taking place in the 1980s between radical feminists opposed to pornography and the pro-sex feminists defending its liberating potential. Subsequently, I engage with both Queer Theory by discussing queer feminist approaches to porn, but also Affect Theory by sharing queer feminist approaches to trauma and the potential healing that an (erotic) film can induce in the spectator. By using as my theoretical tools Paul Preciado’s Testo Junkie (2013), Linda William’s Porn Studies (2004) anthology, The Feminist Porn Book (2013) a collection of essays written by feminists in the porn industry, the Archive of Feelings and Trauma (2003) by Ann Cvetkovich, Pornography: Structures, Agency and Performance (2015) written by Rebecca Sullivan and Alan McKee or The Pornography Industry (2016) by Shira Tarrant, to name a few, I do not simply intend to provide a critical pro-sex view by positioning myself into the pro-sex feminist camp, but also to display other options regarding pornography; how porn can be a productive media by actually forming part of the solution to rape culture.3 In the second chapter, I will discuss three different porn films in order to give some examples of what feminist, ethical, and queer porn is and to answer how and why these films can be characterized as healing tools. To be more specific, the films Much More Pussy (2010), Silver Shoes (2015), and Authority (2009), will provide three different examples of alternative types of pornographic filmography and the potential healing aspect of each film will be analyzed. Finally, the third chapter includes an analysis of the results of a web-based survey that I created for this specific research, which addresses the general awareness of feminist porn, but also the problem of the accessibility to it. They survey and its results is accompanied by three interviews that I conducted, that narrate the stories of those people who experienced sexually violent incidents and their quite different preferences regarding porn, but also indicate the similarities regarding the political aspect of those preferences. Because this is a very sensitive topic of discussion, initially I thought of creating a questionnaire as a method of collecting information instead of conducting interviews for several reasons with time being one of the most significant ones. Nevertheless, some respondents to my survey were also willing to give an interview, thus I decided to conduct and focus on the interviews of three different 3 Emilie Buchwald (1993), author of Transforming a Rape Culture, defines rape culture as a set of beliefs, which promote sexual aggression and violence by men against women, in a society that actually normalizes this behavior. [4] individuals, because I believe that every personal experience provides situated knowledge and valuable partial truth on every research topic. Regarding the methodology, I chose a mixed method research because qualitative and quantitative research methods can answer different types of research questions. Furthermore, quantitative research and especially surveys have been criticized as a positivist research method by feminist scholars. Positivism has received a lot of criticism due to the simple fact that one cannot “conduct completely bias-free research” (Miner and Jayaratne, 2014, p.301). Through a mixture of research methods, with a survey consisted of mostly open-ended questions and anonymized responses that examines and covers a larger part of the population, and the three interviews as personal stories who focus on specific experiences, I aim to produce feminist knowledge that can be partial and situated.4 At this point, I would like to refer to my own position and participation in the pornographic world, as I intentionally situated myself within this industry. As part of my Gender Studies MA program, I chose to work as an intern for The Blue Artichoke Films, a feminist porn production based in Amsterdam. Jennifer Lyon Bell, a U.S. filmmaker, is the producer and director of this feminist porn production, which dedicates itself to making artistic and erotic films that aim to portray a realistic female sexuality. From the first day of my internship, Bell provided me with a list of several tasks and projects that I could get involve with, but most importantly, she introduced me to feminist, ethical, and queer filmography more coherently. Additionally, I attended and participated as Bell’s assistant in two events, related to erotic and feminist cinema: the “Modern Erotic Cinema,” a six-hour workshop on how to create erotic films, which Bell herself gave at Studio K for the students of the Film Academy of Amsterdam on 27 February, 2017, and “The Female Gaze in Cinema,” an event consisting of speeches on feminist cinematography that took place again at Studio K on the International Woman’s Day. As a result, because of the tasks that I had to fulfill, the events which I attended, and Bell’s contribution, I did not only gain valuable knowledge regarding the feminist/alternative porn industry, but I also became part of it in my own way. Subsequently, I chose to conduct research on this specific subject