Here’s part of a brilliant interview at Salon.com with the Feminist Porn Book’s Tristan Taormino about porn and feminism and the fact that they’re not always incompatible:
“…One of the things we’re responding to is that there’s this notion that certainly is propagated by anti-porn feminists and other people, which is that there is one thing called porn with a capital “P.” And it’s monolithic and we can qualify it in all these different ways and say this is what it looks like and this is what it does. As Constance says, “That’s just not true.” What there is is a whole series of pornographies with a lowercase “p,” and that’s what we have to look at and investigate. There is no one thing, and she even challenges the notion that there is a clear division between mainstream porn and independent porn, or mainstream porn and feminist porn, because there are feminists working within the mainstream porn industry and then there are feminists working independently, and there are non-feminists working independently, and vice versa. They’re all over the place.
There isn’t one monolithic thing and, yes, of course, built into feminist porn is the notion that we’re critiquing porn that’s already out there, that we feel like doesn’t represent female sexuality in a diverse enough way, doesn’t prioritize female pleasure, doesn’t represent authentic female desire, or simply doesn’t get us off. So we’re going to go and make our own. I think that’s inherent to the thing: Part of what we’re doing is necessarily in response to what’s already out there…”
I’d highly recommend reading the whole interview here.
