Feminists in Mainstream Pornography

A little while ago I posted an interview with French femme performers Wendy Delorme and Judy Minx. In the video Judy talks about her career as a porn actress and her feminist politics.

girlsmakebetterrainbows posted the following response to the video:

the whole dialogue and discussion surrounding mainstream porn and feminism and post-feminism is yet to happen and I believe that it´s much needed. Judy´s contradictions are so present in society, so many women think like this, it´s something that should be explored.

I for one don´t think mainstream porn can be feminist. Its values and visual language are not feminist.

Can you be a feminist and sex positive activist and a mainstream porn actress? It´s a tough question, because you would say no, I would say no. but she is. or is she!?

Although she presumes the reader will agree with her, that mainstream porn actresses cannot be feminists, (“you would say no, I would say no”) this is not my opinion on the matter. Although I agree that most mainstream porn is not feminist, I do think there are an increasing number of sex-positive feminist performers subverting mainstream porn from the inside. So I thought I would ask Miss Minx if she wanted to reply personally so that I could post it. Here is what she said!

The Impakt Festival video interview went online a few months ago, but it was actually shot over 2 years ago. I posted it on my facebook wall, with the comment “I don’t agree anymore with everything I used to say at the time, or my haircut”. I mostly posted it for the emotional value of seeing images of my first performance ever, and realizing how much I’ve changed in 2 and a half years.

So this interview should be taken with some distance - it’s not where I stand now. I hadn’t experienced as much of the mainstream porn industry as I have now, and I had an idealized vision of it, because I’d been lucky enough to have worked only in friendly, rather sex-positive environments. Maybe I was also a bit naive. And, as I have adressed it since then in several articles on my blog, I was under a lot of outside pressure to defend sexwork. I was 19 years old, and I had to fight very hard against the rest of the world’s assumptions that I was a dumb and exploited teen, a clueless and defenseless victim, or a fucked-up nympho. I was defending myself. Since everytime people criticized porn they did it in ways that stereotyped, disempowered or demonized me, I felt like if I wanted to defend myself I had to reject all criticism of porn. This was very harmful to me, because it prevented me from examining the negative aspects of the industry I worked in, from talking about the bad experiences I might have been going through, and from getting support when I’d had a bad day at work.

Now that I’m older and get more actual support from people around me who respect my choices and my agency while allowing me to talk about porn in more nuanced, critical ways, I have stopped saying that the mainstream porn industry is a feminist heaven. I still believe mainstream porn has a lot of diversity and it’s impossible to generalize on all of it. I still believe I sometimes have some space in it to change it from the inside, to create feminist, sex-positive awareness in the porn industry, and to influence both the working conditions and the contents. But I’ve definately experienced traumatizing shoots, and exploitive/degrading situations. I’ve definately been horrified by the misogynistic, heteronormative discourse carried by some of the movies I was in. I’ve definately felt bad about the way lesbian sex, women, myself and my sexuality, were sometimes depicted.

But even now, as I’m writing this, I fear that talking openly about the negative, exploitative, or degrading experiences I’ve had in porn (which are only a small part of the experience I have of mainstream porn) might weaken my point. I fear that having a nuanced position might be used to dismiss my belief that sexwork is a valid choice for a woman to make, that it isn’t sexwork in and of itself that should be fought, and that better working conditions will only be achieved by decriminalizing sexwork, lifting stigma and shame, and combating whore-phobia.
The commenter doubts that I can be both a feminist and a mainstream porn actress. What, because I am a worker in an industry, I can’t be aware of and opposed to its fucked-up aspects? It doesn’t make sense, unless you consider sexworkers are both victims and culprits in the case. Well, I plead not guilty. I need money, and I have chosen the way that I make money among the limited choices I had, neither of which seemed less exploitative or less patriarchal than sexwork. It seems obvious that although a factory worker participates in a capitalist industry, and is exploited by it, he or she can also be against capitalism. You can question the factory owner’s anticapitalism, and you can doubt whether someone who produces misogynist porn is a feminist. As a porn performer, I’m the workforce, not the boss. Whenever I can participate in feminist porn, I do it. Whenever I have space to criticize the sexism in mainstream porn, or put some of my feminism in my mainstream porn work, I do it. Luckily for me, I usually work in environments in which I can make money working in feminist environments, or at least making my feminist voice heard in mainstream porn environments. If I was able to work only in these environments and still make enough money to pay my rent, I would. But sometimes I find myself working in environments in which I can’t do anything, and I need the money, and I feel exploited and alienated. But how could it make me less of a feminist that I sometimes am a victim of sexism? All women work and live in sexist environments. We are all inside of patriarchy, with more or less awareness of it and freedom to oppose it. Our choices are always more or less limited, and depending on how wide our choices are and where we stand in power relations, we elaborate strategies to make our lives livable. As a sexworker, I think I’m actually in a very good place to understand and fight patriarchy.

Here are more articles from my blog that you can read to know more about my experience and thoughts on these matters.

Read Judy’s blog entries here here here here here here and here