For some people, the title is somewhat weird because they wonder if something like porn can even be feminist. And, if we were to judge the level of sexism in the porn industry, the number would be much, much higher than feminism in other workplaces.
The thing about the mainstream porn being watched these days is that it doesn’t interest women (The reason for that will be discussed a few paragraphs down). Due to that reason, most women aren’t interested in porn at all. They’re not even remotely curious at the idea of trying out what the hype is all about and feminist porn is aimed at rectifying just that.
This post will be about educating the readers on the basics of feminist porn and how it has developed over the years and why it’s booming all of a sudden. Full of questions? Stick around and we’re going to answer most of them.
What is Feminist Porn?
Before getting to what it is, let’s discuss something feminist porn isn’t. There’s a sort of a myth that feminist porn is just not rough and really gentle with a ton of foreplay. Sure, this sentence explains what this type of porn usually is and what the audience expects, but it isn’t all that feminist porn actually is. There’s videos with passionate kissing and there’s also feminist porn with bondage.
Feminist porn is something that isn’t just about professional courtesy and respect on screen. It aims to allow women to consider their jobs as an adult performer professional without having to deal with abuse and sexism that they usually do. And, trust us when we tell you this, women have to deal with a LOT of sexism even though the majority of the viewers are there for the women. Feminist porn aims to eliminate that by providing dignity to the adult performers. They’re respected on screen, allowed to pick what they want to do and what they don’t from the script, stop whenever they want, have a safe-word that is taken extremely seriously, etc. Off-screen, they’re treated just like Kate Winslet behind the curtains of Titanic. Feminist porn is probably the only aspect of porn that focuses on making humane improvement for the people watching as well as the actresses in the videos.
Audience for Feminist Porn
You can’t really answer this question on the dot, since everyone has different preferences and opinion when it comes to adult content. But, the usual audience for feminist porn is obviously women (the word feminine is right there). The reason is that women appreciate the idea of being respected. Typical porn (we’ll talk about this next) focuses on objectifying women and treats them with absolutely no dignity. This doesn’t appeal to most women because instead of getting turned on, they’ll just feel bad for the performer(s) involved. This is completely justifiable since the way women are treated is pitiable.
The second category are couples. Imagine this scenario; you’re watching porn with your wife as foreplay. There’s two people having sex and the man is choking the girl to the point where her face is turning purple. How good will that feel? Your wife is sitting right beside you and there will come a point where she’ll imagine herself in that woman’s shoes and probably you doing the same to her. And, that is the exact opposite of what foreplay is supposed. So, instead couples watch porn that is slightly more gentle and doesn’t give women less respect than what folks usually give to their sex dolls.
But as we said a minute ago, you can’t point a finger at the audience for feminist porn. Some guys even like this type of porn much more than your average videos.
Feminist Porn and Regular Porn
We said that regular porn objectifies women and doesn’t even treat them like a human being. Men are highly portrayed as the superior gender, but women are portrayed as filth. The wording might offend some women, but you know it’s the truth. There are videos titled “cum dumpsters” referring to a lot of men ejaculating on a single women at the same time. The contents of the video are irrelevant, but is calling women cum dumpsters the right way to market videos?
Feminist porn was literally made from the ground up to provide an equal playing field for both men and women in the porn industry. It’s meant to depict both as equals during a video and that is the main reason why it’s really just blowing up.
Another unheard difference between regular and feminist porn is that the latter aims to get rid of the ridiculous fantasies that vendors like Brazzers are currently providing. Every other video features some sort of weird stuff like student/teachers, step-mom/son, brother/sister and so on. Don’t take this the wrong way, feminist porn also indulges in fantasies but none so wacky as a pizza delivery guy getting paid with blowjobs. Stuff like this just doesn’t happen, and since feminist porn is all about representing real life scenarios, it’s a great category if you’re sick of such wild situations.
The History
If you want to go all the way back to figure out where it all began, the one person you should thank would be Candida Royalle. We’ll give a small introduction to Candice Marion Vadala and talk about how a single woman changed the entire course of adult filmmaking.
Introduction
Candida started her professional career as a singer in a jazz bar. She held a tremendous amount of passion for the musical industry and pursued every lead to make it a viable livelihood, but she would soon discover that her musical career wasn’t going to put food on her plate.
Candida was then advised by some people to take on modeling and one thing led to another, she found herself on a set of a porn movie. It took some time, but Candida started her career as an adult performer in 1975. She would go on to direct her own movies and make 25 of them starring herself. She spent the last five years as a performer, but this is where she decided to step on the opposite side of the camera. And, this is how Femme Productions started…
How Feminist Porn Began
At the time, Candida didn’t realize she was laying the foundation for feminist porn (the term didn’t even exist back then). But, when she stepped behind the camera, her aim was to create adult content where women didn’t need to sell their integrity and honor to become a performer. She was the one that had the idea to create more discreet porn for couples which later got called feminist porn.
“I created Femme in order to put a woman’s voice to adult movies and give men something they could share with the women in their lives. You’ll find them to be less graphic, and you’ll also find story lines, good original music and real characters of all ages”.
– Candida Royalle
Candida introduced legitimization to the porn industry and was the first person to actually receive an award. It was for the soundtrack of a movie called Three Daughters written by Gary Window. The woman spent the rest of her life creating amazing adult movies that were loved worldwide. She began as a performer, switched to director, and towards the later years of her life, she became an inspirational speaker for a lot of women.
In the 21st Century
As we mentioned earlier, Feminist Porn has been blowing up quite a bit as more and more people have started indulging themselves in quality videos instead of made up, goofy circumstances created by regular porn vendors. There’s even an annual Feminist Porn Award held in Toronto since the year of 2006. A local sex toy business, Good For Her is the one hosting the ceremonies. This just goes to show how far feminist porn has come over the years and how far it will go over the course of the next few decades.
Closing Thoughts
So, what’s going to happen to feminist porn in the future? Saying that it will excel even further is an enormous understatement. Feminist porn makes a case for itself by literally saying nothing, but other than that, there are US Anti-Porn Activities aimed to demolish the vendors still objectifying women in the industry. Our prediction is that in the next decade or so, feminist porn will probably be called porn. Either the people making regular porn will be wiped out or the ones left will have to switch to more realistic porn pretty quickly. The future holds great things for the porn industry, there’s no doubt about that…