The Female Perspective

On Sunday, Julie Simone interviewed me for a Current TV piece about female perspectives in porn. She was covering this issue at CineKink last week.

During the course of the interview, she asked me about how my female perspective influences the way I made The Bi Apple. And I just went blank, and kind of stammered some stuff out. I’m really starting to feel like I can’t identify with this woman stuff.

It’s not that I don’t think of myself as a woman or that I’m uncomfortable being one. And it’s true that as a woman, I have a female perspective. So does every woman. But other than that, I’m not sure that my sex defines the way I think about making porn.

I think that women becoming porn directors and producers is significant in an industry where women are traditionally talent and not often given creative control or control over their own image. So the panel I was part of this weekend, “Women Behind the Lens,” is still relevant in many ways.

However, speaking for myself at least, I don’t feel like I do what I do and produce media the way I do because of my unique female perspective. My unique perspective on sexuality and sex media is certainly shaped by my experiences in my female body, especially my experiences in the sex industry, but I think it’s something broader than female-ness that shapes and drives my media-making agenda (for lack of a better word).

Fantastic writer and sex educator Cory Silverberg was present at the panel on Saturday, and he went home and blogged something to similar effect:

Being someone whose gender identity doesn’t fit so neatly into one of two check boxes, I don’t usually go in for the “women pornographer” hook when it comes to panels, books, or the like. I don’t believe that having certain chromosomes, a uterus, or being treated your entire life like a second class citizen produces a uniform artistic vision, and so I don’t buy that there’s anything fundamentally different about “women” making adult moves. This isn’t to say that some women don’t do it differently, and certainly these three women do.

I definitely want to see broader conversations about making porn differently - in ways that aren’t proscriptive. Different, better porn doesn’t have to be made by women, or queers, or whatever. It does have to be made by people (grand gesture) who see the world and sexuality through different lenses.

Bonus activity! You can watch the Women Behind the Lens panel on Blip.tv. It’s 64 minutes long and shot from a tripod, so there’s nothing fancy about the camera work, but all the scintillating conversation is there.