Feminist Porn Week Diary, Part 3: Fuck Dolls, Phoenixes, & Accountability

On Thursday April 16th I went to the Public.Provocative.Porn screening at the Bloor cinema. Good For Her hosts this event each year as an accompaniment to the Feminist Porn Awards: it’s an opportunity for attendees to see a broad sampling of the nominated porn films before the awards ceremony.

I crowded into the theatre with a tiny cup of wine and some peanut M&Ms from the Dollarama next door and settled in to watch the 14 (!) different porn shorts on the program. There was a lot to talk about in those clips but here are some personal highlights:

• Last year’s Heartthrob of the Year, Zahra Stardust (a.k.a. the world’s cutest Australian femme princess), screened her film “Fuck Dolls,” in which she and Lexi Laphor writhe around on the girliest bed of all time, fucking with Barbies. By which I mean both “making Barbies fuck each other” and “using Barbies as sex toys.” Zahra wears silver glittery thigh-high boots, there’s a pink sheath over her Hitachi, and the whole film is chock full of cute girly underwear. I turned to my friend and said, “This is the femmiest thing I’ve ever seen in my LIFE!” and she replied, “I know! This is my dream!!”
• Tobi Hill-Meyer’s film “Bound By Borders” is a “docu-porn” in which she and her long-distance partner intermittently have sex and discuss the injustice of their situation: immigration laws, marriage laws, discrimination against poly relationships, etc. We got only a brief taste of the film at the screening but it was enough to leave me and my friend crying quietly into our sleeves. I’d love to see more of this blend of real-world unsexy emotions with sex in the porn of the future.
• Skyler Braeden Fox made his film “Hello Titty” as a goodbye to his breasts before getting top surgery. What we saw was trippy as fuck and included my favorite on-screen domme, Sadie Lune, being delightfully weird and capping off the scene with a lactation money shot. Yes, you read that right.
• I was excited to finally get to see a clip from Shine Louise Houston’s side project Heavenly Spire, after hearing her mention it at the Feminist Porn Conference two years ago and being immediately intrigued. It’s a porn series that celebrates masculinity on all sorts of different bodies. The clip we saw was a kinky tryst between two cis guys, and it was hot as fuuuuck.

After the screening, there was a brief Q&A with some of the filmmakers and performers. It was cool to see so much local Toronto talent on that stage, including my buddies at Spit!

The next night, Friday April 17th, was the centrepiece of the whole week: the Feminist Porn Awards gala! I spent a couple hours getting thoroughly dolled up (outfit details in a minute) and then rode the subway to the Capitol Event Theatre. (Taking public transit while in full formalwear is always a laugh and a half, lemme tell ya.)

I arrived during the pre-show cocktail hour for VIPs and nominees (and media folks comme moi), so I spent some time milling around the bar sipping white wine and chatting with various porno folks. I am super awkward and the idea of approaching my favorite pornographers to compliment their work is utterly terror-inducing, but I managed it a couple times with the help of alcohol. Hallelujah!

As per usual, the event was emcee’d by Ryan G. Hinds and Lex Vaughn. Some of the presenters were folks I know, like Sophie Delancey and Sam Leigh from Tell Me Something Good, and fellow sex bloggers Lorax of Sex and Kara Sutra. The acoustics in the theatre unfortunately made it really hard to hear what people were saying, but, y’know… they looked fantastic.

CoCo La Creme did some burlesque for us, and was ravishing as always. Her act involved a gas can and a handful of baby oil. The crowd was flabbergasted in the best possible way.

Morgana Muses won the Heartthrob of the Year award, which, hell yeah. She got involved in porn after leaving her marriage in her mid-40s, and the film for which she was nominated this year showed her suspended in gorgeous rope bondage, dressed as a stunning phoenix, symbolizing her “rebirth from the ashes” of her old life. I watched the scene in awe and it is a perfect example of how so much eclectic, emotional, life-affirming stuff shows up under the umbrella of feminist porn. I’ve never walked away from a mainstream porn scene feeling profoundly affected or inspired to change my whole life around, but feminist porn has this effect on me regularly. Amazing.

I was also thrilled about Spit winning an honorable mention award. They’re still a very new company but are deadset on proving they earned this honor and having even better stuff to show off next year, and I totally believe they can do it!

There was some controversy surrounding the FPAs this year, which unfortunately the hosts opted to make light of instead of addressing in any real way. Tobi Hill-Meyer’s acceptance speech on behalf of Courtney Trouble touched on these issues in a tactful and respectful manner; I’m glad someone said something about it (thank you, Tobi) and I sincerely hope the FPAs will address some of the community’s concerns by next year.

Before I sign off this series, some quick outfit pictures!

For the Thursday night screening, I kept things casual and wore a lilac tank top tucked into a black bandage skirt, with a black leather jacket and harness boots. My lips were also painted deep purple, because the feminist porn crowd is a community that can truly appreciate a gothy lip, methinks.

For the awards gala, I wore a strapless black tulle dress that I’d scored at Value Village for $10 (#blessed) with red T-strap heels and a little red bag, both also thrifted. I did a red lip with NARS Cruella and a L’Oreal glossy stain, and felt preeeeetty babely.

Well, that’s my whole Feminist Porn Week wrap-up! (Read the two previous parts here and here.) How did your week go?

Feminist Porn Week Rocked

It is kind of astonishing to me that I live in the city where Feminist Porn Week happens to take place every year.

It is truly so amazing and fantastic that it feels like a gift, a glorious coincidence, a joyful miracle. I do not take it for granted.

This year I live-tweeted the whole Feminist Porn Conference, and it made me even more hyper-aware of what was going on around me – in a good way. Reading other people’s moment-by-moment tweets, and composing my own, allowed me to process and enjoy the talks and panels even more.

I won’t write an exhaustive summary like I did last year, because frankly the #FPCon2 hashtag is full of fantastic accounts of what went on. But I will write a little about the most memorable moments and experiences that happened to me during Feminist Porn Week.

The fisting workshop. I will be honest: I bought my ticket not so much because I wanted to learn about fisting (which is still, I think, well out of my vagina’s conceivable grasp), but primarily because I wanted to see Courtney Trouble… in person… fisting someone. I mean, how amazing is that?!

The “fist-ee” was Zahra Stardust, the adorable pink-haired Australian porn princess who ended up winning Heartthrob of the Year at the FPAs two nights later. I developed an intense crush on her from the way she talked intelligently about porn laws down under and then took Courtney’s fist with seemingly no effort. She squirted on the people in the front row. Courtney fucked her powerfully and intensely and it felt so intimate that I shouldn’t be looking, and yet I couldn’t not look. It was beautiful and educational.

Dylan and Danny’s talk. Um, I may have mentioned how much I love Dylan Ryan and Danny Wylde before. They are my favorite porn stars, ever. But I love them even more now, because of the wonderful talk they gave at the conference. They spoke openly and candidly about “getting in and getting out” of the porn industry and how those transitions have affected their identities. They are both amazingly smart and thoughtful. The room was positively packed, for good reason: it was one of the best talks of the conference.

Tobi’s talk. Tobi Hill-Meyer is a trans woman who makes feminist porn, so of course, she’s no stranger to receiving criticism. Her talk was about how to deal with criticism effectively. Of all the sessions I attended, this one had the most pertinence to my real life, and I think many people there felt similarly. When you work in a controversial area like sexuality or feminism, no matter how peripherally or centrally, it is useful – nay, vital – to know how to respond gracefully to critics. I will be sure to start implementing some of the strategies I learned in Tobi’s presentation.

Aussie porn. Australia has some fucked-up porn laws. A lot of it is illegal, and they are very strict about things like fetishes, BDSM, squirting (which they classify as urination and therefore a type of fetish), and fisting. The Aussie porn session, run by the very articulate Ms. Naughty and Zahra Stardust, screened several films, many of which were political and commented directly on the injustice of the porn laws there. I also discovered that Ms. Naughty’s company, Bright Desire, makes the exact kind of porn I’ve been longing for all my life: female-gaze-oriented, female-pleasure-focused, sensual, sexy, soft, yet also hardcore. Hey, my birthday’s in about a week; I’d gladly accept a Bright Desire subscription if you’re not sure what to get me! Wink wink.

Courtney Trouble’s keynote. Oh my fucking god. Everyone was speechless. Not literally – we were all tweeting up a storm and cheering our hearts out – but figuratively, we had the wind knocked out of us by what Courtney had to say. I will embed the video below, because you MUST watch it; there’s little I could say about it that could embody just how powerful it really was. Courtney, if you read this, thank you, thank you, thank you, for saying so many things that badly needed to be said. Every single person I’ve spoken to has said that this speech was one of the main highlights, if not the highlight, of the conference.

Were you at any of the Feminist Porn Week events? What were the highlights for you?

Heads up: there’s a sponsored link in this post!

Obscenity, Authenticity, and Coming Out: My Day at the The Feminist Porn Conference

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On Friday night, I attended the Feminist Porn Awards, an annual event held by my local sex shop Good For Her. I hadn’t planned on going, because I’ve been a little strapped for cash lately, but my friend happened to have an extra ticket and invited me along at the last minute. Obviously, I was thrilled.

The awards were really exciting and a lot of well-deserved films took home Crystal Delights butt plug trophies. I was especially pleased that Fifty Shades of Dylan Ryan (which I loved) received the prize for best kink film, and that so many oppressed groups were honored – for example, in Nica Noelle’s awesome trans-positive flick Forbidden Lovers, and Matthew Clark’s short film Krutch, which focuses on disability and sex.

Honestly, though, it was sort of hard to concentrate on the awards because I was surrounded by so many hot porn stars I could hardly breathe. Dylan Ryan was a few seats to my left, Wolf Hudson was to my right, and directly in front of me were James Darling and Jiz Lee. I have watched all of these people fuck, many times, and have gotten off doing it. I’ve met some of my favorite celebrities before, but seeing someone in person who’s actually induced an orgasm in you (however indirectly) is quite a different story. (And yes, I was way too shy to speak to any of them!)

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The next day, I got up bright and early for the Feminist Porn Conference, put together by Tristan Taormino to coincide with the recent release of the Feminist Porn Book (a great read which I highly recommend). My boyfriend, whose career and hobbies have nothing to do with sex, had nonetheless enthusiastically agreed to come with me, so we went together.

The first session we attended was Lesbo Retro: A Dyke Porn Retrospective, hosted by Shar Rednour and Nan Kinney, two totally captivating dykes associated with iconic lesbian porn companies like Fatale Media and On Our Backs. It was an hour of lezzie porn from the ‘60s up through the ’00s. A lot of it was silly and strange – voluminous hair (both on performers’ heads and in their pubic regions), stilted dialogue, “dyke drama” screaming matches – but I walked out of it with damp panties anyhow. (What can I say? I love a good cunnilingus scene.)

Shar and Nan recalled when they couldn’t ship media to certain zip codes because of the obscenity laws that existed there. Sexual acts like fisting and female ejaculation were considered too extreme to be legal. They would have been risking jail time by distributing those materials to some areas, mostly in the south. I said a little prayer of gratitude for the internet and its magical powers of distribution, as well as for the trailblazers (like Shar and Nan!) who ushered us into our more sex-positive time.

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The second session we attended was To Be Real: Authenticity in Queer & Feminist Porn. It featured Jiz Lee (swoon), Dylan Ryan (also swoon), Shar Rednour again, and Dr. Jill Bakehorn, a sociologist whose research has focused on feminist porn.

The discussion was lively and thought-provoking. Many questions were raised: what is authenticity? How do we know if something is authentic? How can something as performative as porn ever really be authentic? Are we using the word “authentic” when we really mean something else, like sincerity or relatability? And if it gets us off, does it really matter whether or not it’s authentic?

This conversation really hit home for me, because although I’ve often told myself and others that I like “authentic” porn best, sometimes I watch porn that’s probably as genuine as any but just doesn’t do a damn thing for me – like porn where a performer isn’t making any noise, or is making noise but in a way that’s gratingly repetitive and monotonous. Who am I to say that that’s not how those people genuinely react to sexual stimulation? It would be more accurate to say that I simply like porn that suits my tastes, regardless of how genuine it may or may not be.

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Next up was a panel called Being Out Now: How Performers Navigate Sexual Morality and Media Representation. It featured Tina Horn and James Darling (both favorites of mine, both pictured above) as well as Arabelle Raphael, Bianca Stone, Jiz Lee, and Quinn Cassidy.

This panel’s contributors were amazingly diverse in experience and identity. All of them do porn, all of them have at least dabbled in other kinds of sex work (most still do it), two identify as genderqueer, one as trans. All come from different sorts of families with different tolerance levels for what they do and who they are.

There was much discussion about whether one is obligated to come out, and how to remain true to oneself even in situations where one chooses not to come out (a choice usually made out of a desire to maintain safety for oneself and/or the people one is close to). For example, Arabelle suggested that sex workers who don’t want to come out can still vocally support sex workers’ rights when talking to people they’re not out to.

It was interesting to hear the perspective of a white cis male, Quinn Cassidy, in this feminist discourse. He pointed out that the parameters of a person’s “closet” can change depending on what environments that person exists in – meaning, for example, that he often has to “come out” as a cis male in queer communities that may assume he is genderqueer.

Moderator Tina Horn asked the audience to participate in an exercise: we were told to raise our hands if we are “out” about our involvement in the sex world, first to parents, then to siblings, extended family, the world at large, and our employers. It was interesting that so many people (including several of the panelists) said they are out to the internet and the world, but not to their aunts, uncles, and grandparents.

The panel concluded with a discussion on how to be a good ally to sex workers, which included advice like “Listen to them” and “Don’t call yourself a sex worker if you’ve only shot one queer porn scene” and “Start a chapter of SWOP in your area.”

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The last session we attended was a Q&A with Shine Louise Houston, the creator of Crash Pad Series, a huge presence in today’s feminist queer porn world. I’ve reviewed a few Crash Pad scenes before (here, here, and here) and I’m a huge fan of the site.

Shine screened a video she made in which she “interviews herself” via the magic of post-production. The interview was funny and honest, like Shine herself. One thing she mentioned which struck me as particularly interesting is that she almost never jerks off to her own porn, even though the whole Crash Pad Series is based around her personal fantasies of voyeurism. She also pointed out that porn is “about more than getting off” – when done well, it can be a medium for pushing boundaries, for exercising one’s right to free speech, and for normalizing certain sex acts so people feel they have permission to explore. Hear hear!

The Q&A session after the video ended up being mostly a discussion about coming out as a pornographer, after Shine confessed that she isn’t out to her kids and doesn’t plan on changing that in the foreseeable future. While I appreciated that some of the audience members felt strongly about coming out as a form of political activism (“being militantly out,” as Quinn Cassidy had phrased it earlier in the day), I didn’t like that some of them seemed to be shaming Shine for her choices. I think everyone gets to choose whether or not they want to come out, and to whom, and it isn’t helpful to shame someone for staying in the closet if that’s what they want to do.

It was also interesting to hear that people frequently complain to Shine about her site not being diverse enough, but that she also receives complaints when she puts a cis male on the site (some past examples include Ned Mayhem and Mickey Mod). How sad that the queer community, known for diversity and acceptance, would revolt against cis guys even if they’re having sex in deliciously transgressive ways.

Just before leaving, I bought a copy of Tristan Taormino’s Expert Guide to Pegging (which had nabbed Tristan the Smutty Schoolteacher award the night before, yay!). Then I headed home, smiling and feeling wonderfully enlightened.

Photo credits: the Feminist Porn Awards, Wikipedia, Crash Pad Series, and Queer Porn Review.

Sharing the Sexy #20

• Here’s a great essay about being intersex.

How to be an ally to your fat lover!

• This typography series by Sophia Wallace, Cliteracy, is fucking spot-on!

• Ever wondered how to recycle old sex toys? Now you know!

Jenna from silicone sex toy maker Tantus did an AMA on Reddit. Goooood readin’.

Lilly’s review of the Jimmyjane Hello Touch is way better than mine and contains lots of information that might be of interest to you.

• This asshole wants to start “Have Sex with an Ugly Person Day.”

• Metis Black explains how to spank. I’m reviewing one of Tantus’ new paddles soon and I’m so excited!

• Toronto-dwellers: have you got your Feminist Porn Awards ticket yet? (I’ll be at the conference. Let me know if you’re going and want to say hi!)

• Hugo Schwyzer says being pegged makes men better lovers and better feminists.