How Dirty Pictures Changed My Life

a former antiporn crusader muses on the positive powers of smut and its growing feminist audience

Burn it," I said. "Burn every last bit of it. Or it's over."

I pointed at the stockpile of hard-core porn that had just slid out of the closet in an avalanche. If looks could kill, my boyfriend would have dropped dead. How could he, Mr. Sensitive Guy, enjoy such disgusting trash? I was livid. I paced around his tiny one-room apartment, devising his punishment. "Either all this sleazy shit goes or I go."

He looked at me like he was about to cry; his fingers nervously picked at the edges of his flannel shirt. "I'll get rid of it all, I promise," he whispered. "But first will you watch just one video with me?"

The nerve. Here I am threatening to walk, and he's got the audacity to ask me to watch a fuck film before I go. He prattled on about how he just wanted a chance to show me why this stuff turned him on and that it didn't mean he didn't love me. If I didn't like it he would, as agreed, torch everything in a purging bonfire. I crossed my arms and chewed on the inside of my lip for a minute. If I was going to make him destroy his life's collection of porno, I guess I could allow him one last fling. So that evening we watched Sleepless Nights. It was the first dirty movie I ever saw. A seminal film.

I was 20 years old then. Now I'm 30. Since that time I've watched hundreds of X-rated videos, patronized many erotic theaters, put money down for live sex shows and even run up a few phone sex bills. Today I make porn for a living. I edit an erotic magazine called Future Sex, and recently I produced Cyborgasm, a virtual audio CD. I'm a firm believer that if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.

Until I sat down and watched an adult film, the only thing I knew about porn was that I shouldn't be looking at it. Growing up female, I quickly learned that girls don't get to look at girlie magazines. Sure, you could take your clothes off for the camera (becoming, of course, a total slut and disgracing your family), but the pleasure was for his eyes only. The message to us girls was: Stay a virgin until you get married, then procreate and don't bother finding your clitoris. Whatever you do, stay away from porn because it's a man's world, honey.

Ironically, certain strains of feminism gave a similar sermon. Pornography can only exploit, oppress and degrade you. It will destroy any female in its path unless you can destroy it first. And if you don't believe this, you have obviously been brainwashed by the Patriarchy.

If anything, the forbidden aspect of pornography made me a little curious, but I wasn't going to risk renting a porn video. So Greg's challenge to watch with him gave me the chance to see for myself what all the fuss was about.

At the time, I considered myself an antiporn feminist. Before that I was a rock-and-roll chick from Chicago. I grew up on the northwest side of the city, not too far from Wrigley Field-- the last in a line of four Polish-Catholic, middle-class kids. My childhood was carved out of a loaf of Wonder Bread. It was like, you know, normal.

"But how did you get so interested in sex?" I'm always asked. I interpret this question to mean, "What terrible trauma did you experience as a child to make you so perverted?" The answer: I was a corrupted papist.

Catholic school was 12 long years of wool-plaid penance, confessing to empty boxes of sin and silently debating whether Mary stayed a virgin even after Jesus was born. I would stare up at the crucifix and wonder how much it must have hurt. Then I would wonder what Jesus looked like naked. Because of my profane thoughts, I always feared that I'd become a nun. Of course, I never got that calling. I chalked it up to the fact that God wouldn't pick someone who mentally undressed His only son.

Or perhaps I simply inherited a kinky gene. My brothers read Playboy. My dad read Hustler. I know that because I used to steal peeks at it every time I had the chance. Whenever I would start to feel bored, I'd think, Maybe I should go look at that Hustler magazine again. My father had a couple of them hidden with his fishing tackle in the basement. On hot summer days I'd go downstairs, lie on the cool concrete floor and study those bizarre naked pictures. The one I remember most was of an Asian woman smoking a cigarette out of her pussy. It was the weirdest thing I'd ever seen. One day the magazines weren't there anymore. My mother found them and threw them out. I didn't look at sex magazines again until I got to college.

I moved to Minneapolis in the early Eighties and enrolled in premed at the University of Minnesota. Eventually, I dropped out of premed and went to art school, where I came out as a film major. My roommate came out as a lesbian. She was the first dyke I ever knew. Suzie was from California and was totally rad. Together we ate our first mouthfuls of feminism.

I had never heard the word feminist before. My mother wasn't a feminist, my older sister didn't call herself a feminist. Yet feminism gave me the words to describe my experience. I quickly learned that being treated with less respect simply because I was female was called sexism, and it was not OK. Feminism illuminated the offenses that I had chalked up to being a girl: enduring public comments on the size of my breasts, being paid less than my male counterparts for the same work, putting up with shoddy contraception. This knowledge was power--power to take control of my life.

Suzie and I resolved to be women, not girls. We tromped on every bit of sexism in popular culture. We marched for choice. We resented having to be constantly on guard against the threat of rape. We mourned the plight of women across the globe who lived in squalid cages. We turned into pink sticks of dynamite, the crackle and spit of our fast-burning fuses getting louder all the time.

Pornography, of course, was the big bang. At that time, Minneapolis was a hotbed of radical antiporn politics. Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin were teaching a class on porn at the U of M, and they drafted the very first feminist-inspired antipornography law, which defined pornography as a form of sex discrimination. There was a demonstration on campus against the Story of O, and fliers were distributed denouncing S&M as just another bourgeois word for violence. Not a Love Story, a documentary about one woman's adverse experience in the adult business, became a Women's Studies classic. One woman set herself on fire at Shinder's Bookstore on Hennepin Avenue, a martyr to the fight for a porn-free society. The message was clear: This battle was as important as the ending of the Vietnam war.

Meanwhile, the Meese commission was in full swing, bringing the disturbing coercion testimony of Deep Throat star Linda "Lovelace" Marchiano into the living rooms of America and alleging a link between pornography and violence. Women Against Pornography toured the heartland with its slide show featuring the infamous Hustler cover of a woman being pushed through a meat grinder. The tenet seemed to be: Get rid of porn and you'll get rid of all injustice against women. So I enlisted.

I had never watched an adult film, bought an explicit sex magazine or known anyone outside my family who did. Aside from a few stolen glances at my father's collection, the only pornography I saw was in the classroom. This carefully selected group of pornographic images didn't appear very liberating--she's tied up and gagged, with clothespins biting down on her nipples; she's spreading her legs wide open showing pink; his come is squirting all over her face. All were described as inherently degrading and oppressive. No other interpretation was offered. I studied the images (which were supposedly representative of all porn), added my firsthand experience of being sized up as a piece of ass and agreed that pornography was the reason women were oppressed. Pornography bred sexism. Like Justice Potter Stewart, I knew pornography when I saw it, and by now I'd seen enough to swallow the rally cries of the antiporn movement unquestioningly. I chanted and marched and applauded the spray-painting of Lies about women over Virginia Slims ads and across the fronts of black-veiled XXX bookstores. And I learned the slogan: "Porn is the theory, rape is the practice."

But soon I began to wonder how it all fit in with what I did in my bedroom. I still liked men, even if I didn't like their piggish behavior. And I liked sleeping with them even more. I began to question the definition of pornography that I'd been taught. Yes, the images I'd seen offended me, but surely there were sexual images that weren't sexist. Where were the erotic alternatives? If looking at pictures of people having sex was wrong, then I hadn't come far from Catholic school after all. Plus, lumping all men under the heading Sexist Patriarchy seemed unfair. The guys that I hung out with were caring, respectful and intelligent. Could they suddenly turn into psychopathic rapists if I waved a porn mag in their faces? I had a lot of questions. And then my boyfriend's porn came tumbling out of the closet.

•

"Ready?" he asked, looking at me with dark eyes that seemed full of some corrupt knowledge I didn't yet have. We were both nervous; he was afraid I was going to hate it and leave him. My fear was more complicated.

"Yeah," I said, my voice cracking. Greg slipped Sleepless Nights into the VCR. I began churning up shame-filled scenarios: What if my roommate were to walk in and catch us watching this dirty movie? Or worse, what if I get so turned on by this hideous smut that I become a full-blown porn addict? I could hear a voice saying, "What a disgusting girl. No one's going to want you once they find out about this."

Or what if I laugh?

My initial reaction was, Boy, is this stupid. Everything was bad: lame script, lousy acting, garish lighting, crippled disco soundtrack, anachronistic garter belts and repulsive leading men. As a film student I was appalled that the director didn't bother with the basics of good filmmaking. The plot was forgettable. I vaguely remember a contrived sex scene on a pool table. I (continued on page 88)Dirty Pictures(continued from page 82) waited for the violent rape scene, but it never happened.

"Is that all?" I asked when it was over. I expected my porn research to yield some kind of groundbreaking vision, the way my initial glimpses of feminism had.

It's hard to remember what made me want to watch another one. Part of it was like social anthropology, peeling back the layers to see what I could see. And the unladylike act of watching porn was piquantly rebellious. But as we watched other X-rated films, I noticed they all suffered from the same plague of filmic badness. I spent my early viewing hours counting pimples on performers' asses and mimicking the orgasmic fakery of the starlets.

A paradox emerged that I didn't understand. Sometimes I'd see an image of a woman on all fours begging for a guy's cock and think, How humiliating. Other times during similar scenes, the actress' eyes filled with fire so genuine, and the actor stroked her hair so tenderly while she sucked him off, that it seemed romantic, like an unfiltered moment of pleasure. I began to separate the images, recognizing that all of them weren't the same. I began to have flashes of lust.

But I wanted what Greg was having. He was getting something out of these movies that I wasn't. The movies didn't turn me off, but they didn't completely turn me on either. I decided I needed to be alone with pornography. I wondered what might turn me on, if anything. God only knew what could happen to a girl who got excited by thinking of a naked Jesus. I wanted to perform an experiment. I had to get a little dirty.

My first date was with an "all-lesbian" action feature called Aerobisex Girls. I tried not to care about the plot and I didn't wonder about the performers' family histories. The movie featured an oily orgy where the women shook with the fury of real, uncontrollable orgasms. I could feel the heat between my legs. I started fingering myself in sync with the women in the film. I opened and closed my eyes, imagining I was part of their scene, replaying certain close-ups over and over. Then my mind began moving back and forth between the real-time video and the frozen frames of cherished erotic memories. I fed the screen with my own fantasies, splicing together an erotic sequence that played only in my head. When I came, it was intense.

•

Now I knew firsthand what men do with sex magazines: Guys don't buy porno to look at women and think, I'd like to marry her. They masturbate to it. They jerk off. Masturbation is such a big part of every man's life, and to a much lesser extent every woman's, yet nobody talks about it. Men do it and don't talk about it, while women don't talk about it and don't do it. This is a fact. Studies like the Kinsey Report and the Hite Report have documented the high percentage of women who do not masturbate. The statistics are corroborated by our language. There aren't even words to describe female self-stimulation. Jerking, wanking and beating off all involve a penis, not a clitoris. It's a testimony to how cut off women are from their sexuality, both physically and psychologically.

I didn't masturbate until I was nearly 20 years old and a vibrator hit me on the head--literally. It rolled off a high shelf and bonked me. As if I were a cartoon character, a light bulb went on above my head and I decided to give myself a buzz. It was the first time I had an orgasm. I had never thought much about touching myself until then. Imagine a guy who doesn't masturbate until an appliance hits him on the head at the age of 20.

At the beginning of my porn adventures I was looking for a political theory instead of a sexual experience, and that's why it hadn't been working. Now I had the carnal knowledge that so few women possessed: how to use porn and come. What's important about this isn't just that I learned how to get aroused physically by pornography, but that I became sexually autonomous. I was now in complete control of my own erotic destiny. My experience was sexual liberation in action. I now knew how to use my mind to turn a two-dimensional image into a flesh-and-blood erotic response and how to explore sexual fantasies. Pornography made me aware that my sexual imagination wasn't limited to the heat of the moment or a sensual reminiscence. I could think about anything. I could use anything--books, magazines, videos--for erotic inspiration.

One of my formative sources of inspiration was a journal titled Caught Looking. Written by a group of East Coast feminist activists, this book combined academic refutations of the antiporn argument with hard-core sex pictures. As its title implied, it gave women the rare opportunity to look at a wide variety of pornographic images. This book confirmed what I had by now realized: The censorship of pornography is unfeminist. Here was a whole new breed of women who were reclaiming the power of female sexuality. I felt a part of that breed.

Soon I was reading On Our Backs, a lesbian sex magazine edited by a woman named Susie Bright. This was pornography created by women for women--how revolutionary! It challenged countless stereotypes about lesbian sex being boring and vanilla, and ripped apart the notion that porn was only for men. I uncovered Candida Royalle's series of feminist porn videos and watched every one with a feeling of fervent camaraderie. Other books, such as Nancy Friday's My Secret Garden, which detailed women's wide-ranging sexual fantasies, and Coming to Power, edited by the lesbian S&M group Samois, further validated my position that female sexuality was a powerful force that could not be pigeonholed politically.

My newfound sexual freedom was sweet, but finding pornography I liked was difficult. As I waded through the swamp of split beavers and raging hard-ons, I felt by turns critical, angry, depressed, pensive, embarrassed and bored. I began a relentless search for the right stuff. Often, I was surprised at the things that made me wet; things that would doubtless get labeled as "male oriented" and "degrading" by good feminist soldiers. Still, the good parts were so rare, I spent more time fingering the fast-forward button than anything else. I wanted images that reflected my own erotic desires and depicted authentic female sexuality. I scanned for cute guys with long hair, punk, butchy women, plots with lots of psychosexual tension, come shots where he doesn't pull out and, most of all, genuine female orgasms.

It seemed the biggest problem with pornography wasn't that it was evil-smelling and immoral--it was artificial and predictable.

Also, it's usually described as offensive. Yet I found that much of what is offensive about porn has to do with interpretations, not sexual acts. Take the controversial example of a woman sucking a man's cock until he comes all over her face. This image can be presented in a crass and repellent way, or it can be depicted as sensuous and (continued on page 145)Dirty Pictures(continued from page 88) kind. To me, the act itself isn't degrading; feeling my lover come all over me can be the most intimate gift. But no matter how artfully presented, the image is almost always received negatively because people refuse to believe that there can be other interpretations.

The words degrading and oppressive are often presented as absolute, objective terms. I found them to be vague and subjective. Was the act of a woman spreading her legs and wanting sex degrading? Were photographs of her genitals outright demeaning? Why is the image of a woman's sexual appetite seen as oppressive rather than liberating? And if we're going to talk about oppressive images of women, we'd better include laundry soap commercials. The depiction of women as vapid Stepford wives, valued only for their stain-removing talents, is, to me, completely oppressive.

Another thing that really surprised me as I explored this erotic underworld was the lack of violence. I was taught to believe that all porn is violent. However, the majority of commercial porn is rather peacefully formulaic. No knives, no blood, no rape scenes. Instead, there is a lick-suck-fuck formula that ends in orgasm, not murder.

Ultimately, I felt the antiporn feminists viewed women as having no sexual self-awareness. Their arguments for the elimination of porn were flawed. Their claims denied women independence by refusing to acknowledge that women have rich sexual fantasies, powerful libidos and the power to choose.

I chose to discuss sex in a way my older sister probably never did, particularly with my women friends. They related to my journey from antiporn to sex-positive feminism, because many of them were on the same trip. They, too, were fed up with everyone shouting "Don't look!" when it came to porn. They wanted to see it and they wanted me to show it to them. We traded vibrator advice, talked about our erotic fantasies--or lack of them--and shared the secrets of our guilt-ridden, latent masturbatory experiences. We didn't waste time dissing men. We mainly focused on ourselves and figuring out how to power up our own orgasms, though we did agree that the general lack of male nudity was lame. Tits and ass flood our culture, but male bare bodies are almost nowhere in sight. We also found it interesting that pornography is usually discussed as the sexual depiction of women, yet almost all heterosexual porn features women and men. We felt that if porn were to come of age, the images of women would have to change along with the images of men. Paunchy guys with overgrown mustaches who had little to offer except their big dicks weren't our idea of sexy. We wanted bad boys with angel faces who understood the meaning of seduction. We also wanted them to be a little vulnerable.

Men were intrigued but confused by my overt sexuality. It conflicted with their understanding of feminism. A lot of men my age were raised to believe that if you respected women, you didn't look at naked pictures of them. So if I was a feminist, how could I like pornography? To them, the concept of a loudmouthed, sexually self-governing woman was exciting and challenging, and sometimes a bit scary.

Surprisingly, or maybe not, I was never directly attacked by antiporn feminists. People expect me to tell horrifying tales of how I was branded a traitor and run out of Wimmintown on a rail. Actually, the response to my work has always been overwhelmingly positive. I believe it's because more women realize that erotic images have a necessary place in their lives. If a basic tenet of feminism is that women should have the freedom to choose, then it should include making choices about what we do sexually.

Of course, this freedom to go for the erotic gusto exists because of the tremendous gains founding feminists made. If it weren't for social and economic battles won during the past few decades, female sexuality would still be chained in ignorance and silence. The sexual revolution of the Sixties and Seventies paved the way for my generation's erotic liberation.

As a card-carrying feminist, I chose to pursue a career as a pornographer. After college I headed west to San Francisco and worked for two years with my mentor, Susie Bright, as the senior editor at On Our Backs. In 1991 I was hired to edit Future Sex, a magazine that explores the intersection of sex, technology and culture. I had written about so many aspects of sex, but not this one. What was the link between sex and technology anyway? Was it virtual reality sex? Digital porn? Fucking robots? While these concepts were certainly futuristic, I hoped they weren't the only things the future of sex had to offer.

That today's young women are able to think more critically about pornography is the result, in part, of technology. The VCR brought a female audience to porn and gave it the unprecedented opportunity to see what porn is. Video porn allows both women and men to investigate sexual imagery in a more independent way. Moving X-rated images out of public theaters into the privacy of the bedroom gave women safe access to previously off-limit behavior. In fact, women now represent the fastest-growing group of consumers of erotic material.

I now realize that technology may be this generation's key to taking control of our sexual identities. While computer technology may seem isolating rather than unifying at first, personal computers, modems, camcorders and a host of other tools offer the potential for unparalleled erotic communication. Technology puts the means of production back in everyone's hands. We no longer have to depend on someone else's mass-produced idea of eroticism; we can create our own--easily, cost-effectively, often instantly. Moreover, digital technology gives us the chance to transmit our ideas globally, not just locally.

But the depth of female and male sexuality can't be explored if we don't break the mold of prefabricated turn-ons. We've got the power to turn the tired, piston-driven porn formula into a fluid reflection of modern erotic culture. What's hot isn't limited to high heels and big cocks. That's why the genesis of this new erotic entertainment must be influenced by people with more diverse points of view. And I intend to be influential right from the start.

Since I watched Sleepless Nights almost nine years ago, I've learned a lot about myself and the power of being female. I've learned that the erotic impulse is a part of being human, that it can't be controlled through warfare or replaced by a silicon chip. Pornography is a mirror reflecting our rosiest desires and our blackest fears. It catches us looking. And these days I like much more of what I see--especially when I've created it.

"Pornography made me aware that my sexual imagination wasn't limited to the heat of the moment."

"Antiporn feminists refuse to acknowledge that women have rich sexual fantasies and the power to choose."