The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure by Tristan Taormino, Constance Penley, Celine Parrenas Shimizu, Mireille Miller-Young

At this point, I asked her pointedly, “what do you want women to find sexy?” She laughed and responded that it wasn’t for her to say. “But isn’t this what’s at stake here?” I asked. And then, frustrated with this level of abstraction, I couldn’t help myself. I said: “Look, I do wish that I found lesbian feminist imagery more appealing, but often what I want to watch is raunchy porn. I feel very capable, though, of disidentifying with it. It does not determine my politics, or other things about my life. Still, are you suggesting that my sexuality is less feminist, or more damaged, than it should or could be?” Levy replied in a somewhat defensive tone, “I don’t know. I’m not your therapist. You’d need to look into that yourself.”
    So there I was, a women’s studies professor, being told that I needed therapy by the woman the New York Post has called “feminism’s newest and most provocative voice.” Of course it wasn’t that I wanted Levy to authorize my pervy desires; instead, I truly wanted to know how Levy believed our generation should be defining feminist sexuality. Though she wouldn’t be specific, what I take from her book and her talk is that we should relate to our attraction to raunchiness like we might relate to a pattern of dysfunctional relationships: no matter how attractive assholes are, at some point you need to rewire your desire in the direction of what’s good for you. We need to get clean and sober.
    At the end of the day, my exchange with Levy drew my attention to the persistent gulf between feminist and queer approaches to sexuality. While Levy might seem like something of a 1970s lesbian feminist throwback, her position shares much in common with that of seemingly more sex-positive, or porn-positive, feminist voices of our time. Ultimately, Levy is a champion of genuine female desire, and her dual focus on femaleness and genuineness is consistent with the aims of many feminist leaders in the sex industry (though the latter are far more certain than Levy that porn is an outlet for genuine female desire). For instance, according to the folks at Good for Her, the Toronto feminist sex shop that hosted the 2011 Feminist Porn Awards, feminist porn must meet one of the following criteria: “a woman must have been involved in the production, writing, or direction of the work; or the work must convey genuine female pleasure; or the piece must expand the boundaries of sexual representation and challenge mainstream porn stereotypes.” Allison Lee, Good for Her’s manager adds that, “Feminist porn is not necessarily directed by women or only aimed at women. But what feministporn does do is take women into account as viewers. . . . One of the things that is considered is whether it’s something they think that women might enjoy.” 2 In sum, feminist approaches to sexuality privilege women’s genuine desires and experiences, but it does so without much critical reflection on who we think women are, and how they come to desire what they do.
    In contrast, queer approaches to sexuality—at least those informed by queer theory—are not likely to take the gender binary or the pursuit of genuineness so seriously. As transgender theorists like Kate Bornstein and Jacob Hale have so beautifully illustrated, biological maleness and femaleness are hardly the most interesting or erotic ways to organize or represent sexuality. What a sad and boring state of affairs it would be if marketers could truly anticipate what “women might enjoy.” The beauty of queer desire is precisely that it is unpredictable, potentially unhinged from biological sex or even gender, and as such, difficult to commodify. A given viewer may have a vagina, but while watching porn, who knows what kind of subjectivities emerge (male? alien? robot? wolf?), or what kind of imagery this viewer might enjoy. Sure, market research may indicate that women do, in fact, have group preferences (for deeper plot narratives,