This is a repository copy of Porn, pantomime and protest: the politics of bawdiness as feminine style. White Rose Research Online URL for this paper: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/133342/ Version: Accepted Version Article: Willson, J orcid.org/0000-0002-1988-1683 (2018) Porn, pantomime and protest: the politics of bawdiness as feminine style. Porn Studies, 5 (4). pp. 426-439. ISSN 2326-8743 https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2018.1480411 © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an author produced version of a paper published in Porn Studies. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. Reuse Items deposited in White Rose Research Online are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved unless indicated otherwise. They may be downloaded and/or printed for private study, or other acts as permitted by national copyright laws. The publisher or other rights holders may allow further reproduction and re-use of the full text version. This is indicated by the licence information on the White Rose Research Online record for the item. Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing [email protected] including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. [email protected] https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ 1 Jacki Willson Performance and Cultural Industries, University of Leeds [email protected] Dr. Jacki Willson is a University Academic Fellow (UAF) at The University of Leeds. She is the author of The Happy Stripper: Pleasures and Politics of the New Burlesque (2008) and Being Gorgeous: Feminism, Sexuality and the Pleasures of the Visual (2015) both published by I.B.Tauris. 2 Acknowledgements I would like to thank the journal editors and the anonymous peer-reviewers for their rigorous insights and helpful responses to earlier drafts of this essay. 3 Porn, Pantomime and Protest: the politics of bawdiness as feminine style. This article explores the significance of the recent ‘Face-Sitting’ protest that took place outside of Westminster in 2014. A carefully staged response to changes to pornography legislation that criminalized particular sexual practices pertinent to women’s pleasure, this porn-panto protest put the spectacle of the ‘kinky’ woman and her desires centre stage. The activists’ unique use of fetish dress, class and humour is explored in relation to the protest by brothel keeper and campaigner Cynthia Payne in the 1970s/80s. Payne deployed bawdy humour and a particular high camp use of ‘kinky’ dress and English etiquette to undermine contemporary sexual norms. The 2014 protest also clearly reclaimed two traditional roles within English pantomime: the Dame and the Principal Boy. These examples will be used to examine the political function of humour in relation to cross-dressing and the ‘woman-on-top’. Ultimately, this study argues that ‘bawdiness’ is a politics that offers us potential promise but not without critical limitations established through media representations. Keywords: bawdiness; resistance; legislation; unruliness; face-sitting protest; Cynthia Payne; sexual pleasure; camp. Introduction On December 12 2014, a theatrically camp and bawdy ‘Face-Sitting’ protest took place outside Westminster in London. Sex workers, activists and performers gathered together to protest against recent legislation. This legislation made it a criminal offence to represent sexual activity in video-on-demand (VoD) online pornography, where there was a risk of suffocation or consensual erotic violence that leaves marks. The Audiovisual Media Services Regulations 2014 (an amendment of the 2003 4 Communications Act) requires that UK based video-on-demand online porn follows the same British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) guidelines that were set out for sex shop DVD porn. This legislation in effect ruled out pornography that focused on female orientated ‘kinky’ pleasure such as ‘face-sitting’ and female ejaculation. Face-sitting in fact sits amongst the major activities listed as ‘life-endangering’ by the BBFC. It also outlawed the depiction of alternative sexual preferences such as S&M bondage/fetish where consensual erotic pain/violence - whipping, spanking, fisting, caning or being restricted - leaves welts on the skin. The law also prohibited what were seen as sexually humiliating acts such as urolagnia (golden showers or watersports). The activists involved in this protest came dressed up in character for their respective sex roles, whether as a Femdom S&M dominatrix – cut glass accent and school ‘marm’ dress - or dressed in a manner which lampooned the ‘life-endangering’ suffocating elements of the activity - wearing a snorkel. This was activism where protest was relayed through bawdy performance and provocative dress up and role play. Throughout the performance the activists ‘sat’ on male protesters whilst ‘caning’ and ‘spanking’ the participants. One participant, in the process of being sat on contributed by chanting, ‘What do we want. Face-Sitting. When do we want it? Now’. They also held up placards with the slogans, ‘I reserve my right to the English vice’ and ‘Shame on You: We Come Too’, written above and below a pink painting of a vulva and vaginal opening. Unsurprisingly the event sparked much publicity and the media employed a similar strategy of humour. One report claimed, for instance, that some media photographers on arrival were disappointed that the activists performed whilst fully clothed. Other reports played with the mixture of ‘panto’ and ‘porn’ – for instance an article entitled ‘sex and snorkels’. This bawdy interplay between the performance 5 and the media underscores an important democratic questioning and airing of perversion and the preposterous. The way in which bawdiness was received and played out in the public domain highlights a dialogue which makes a theatre of sexualized humour and dress. I would like to argue that this public dialogue – between the ‘face-sitting’ protest and the media circus - enacts a politics of bawdiness. The performative use of theatrical play is used to question social and legal value systems as regards female pleasure and its counter offensive of shame. The legislation on kinkiness and ‘appropriate’ pornography is indeed shown to be gendered. It is this tension and tussle as regards ‘pleasure’, ‘obscenity’ and ‘perversity’, in relation to ideal sexual and gendered behaviour, that will occupy my discussion. The use of bawdiness by the protestors humorously made transparent the way that class, gender and Englishness produces and performs ‘pleasure’ via shame. This mode of social protest is not, however, new. In order to understand the way this established approach functions it is important, therefore, to discuss its links with earlier political practices. The bawdy 1970s/80s public persona of English brothel keeper Cynthia Payne is the precursor that will inform my discussion. Payne’s high- profile case merits recovery because of the media circus that responded to her high camp sexual politics, behaviour and persona. The article will explore the manner in which Payne’s work challenged legislation as regards ‘kinkiness’. It will also explore the way that she has been preserved in popular culture, in films such as Wish You Were Here (1987) and books, such as Cynthia Payne’s own manual, Entertaining at Home (1987). She is remembered for her bold shame-free heterosexual femininity that challenged sexual and gender norms. 6 Both the 2014 and earlier protests made a spectacle out of an unruly femininity in their use of high camp fetish BDSM costume (Bondage, Discipline, Domination, Submission, Sadomasochism). This was used to undermine gender, sex and class norms. Role play was used to ham up and switch gender, sex and class roles, to ‘“camp up” ideology in order to undo it’ (Tyler 2003,102) or more succinctly, to overdo it (40). By ‘occupying’ (Halberstam 2013, xiv) heterosexual femininity in such a theatrical, political and bawdy manner, the ideological underpinning of sexual citizenship becomes transparent. Irigaray’s notion of ‘feminine style’ is therefore a useful linchpin for this argument. For Irigaray (1985, 76), ‘feminine style’ is to ‘assume the feminine role deliberately […] in particular […] ideas about herself, that are elaborated in/by a masculine logic […] so as to make “visible,” by an effect of playful repetition, what was supposed to stay invisible’. The protestors performed heterosexual femininity as ‘disruptive excess’ (1985, 78) to bring to the fore the censorious way class, sex and nationhood configures femininity. My argument is that bawdiness performs female heterosexuality as a claim for female ‘kinkiness’. Bawdy humour is used to critique laws which straitjacket heterosexual female sexual freedoms. However, the media reaction to both the 2014 protest and the protests by Payne in the 1970/80s also reveal the limits to these modes of protest. By reiterating bawdy politics as entertaining panto-porn, the media circus could dissipate its threat. Bawdiness, Shame and Unruly Femininities Cynthia Payne’s case merits recovery because of its challenges to the absurdity of sexual norms, both in terms of her clashes with the law, and her dress and behaviour. Gender – specifically heteronormative femininity - is policed by rituals of shame. 7 Exploring Payne’s corporeal resistance and resilience to shame gives us a strong precedent and theoretical context for the current activist demonstrations. I will begin my analysis with a scene from the film Wish You Were Here (1987). The film is about the early life of Cynthia Payne – played here by Emily Lloyd - who was convicted in 1980 of keeping a ‘disorderly house’ after police raided her home in South London in 1978. Emily Lloyd’s performance of Payne is brazen and upfront. One scene shows Lloyd as the young Payne, flouting rules of female decorum and feminine appropriateness. She is seen pulling up her dress, doing a ‘moonie’ and sticking her two fingers up, whilst singing an ‘Up Your Bum’ rap.