Academicum – A Porn Scholar's Hall Pass

It has been nearly three months since I last updated this site, but apart from the whole end-of-the-year shenanigans I have very, very good excuses.

This pornscholar left her computer – and her country – and immersed herself into pornography (this time in 3D and real time and within a hand’s reach). The result of this adventure will be slowly and gradually unveiled in these pages. 

To start, here is a first-timer eye-witness account of the Adult Video Network Award and Expo, which took place in Las Vegas in January. It was originally published at AIP Daily but with different photographs.

Enjoy!

Breakfast can be caramel vodka and Bloody Mary shots, and you run into stars who want to eat your pussy for business and photographers who want to see your breasts and they say that out loud, and perverts are everywhere and we love it, and the fan line is huge but when we sit for coffee we talk about diets and make up and power struggle, and we never eat but we sit at Mr. Lucky’s and watch people and ourselves, and that is what you do in Vegas, you sit down and you watch yourself while all those lights kind of blind you a bit. I sit back and observe the people I study, already thinking about this article, and in my mind I can classify them into categories, but suddenly they are talking about five hundred dollars dresses and alcohol and paleo and psychology, and I loose myself into my ridiculous classification and decide just to watch.

During the day the exp floor becomes packed with people, and press is all around covering every single move, but not many people pay attention to the seconds between flashes, when faces are tired of smiling and drop for a second, while the frenzy of fans waiting 25 minutes in line for an eight seconds interaction pays for the trip. I watch, and wonder how many stories fit inside those eight seconds, and how ego boosting all that can be if you are a performer. For the studios, the never-ending line of consumers make it all worth their while: this is how they measure how much they are making, regardless of numbers. The hoard of porn fans – old, young, men, women, singles, couples – flocking around a booth makes you stop and wonder who is signing. If you are lucky, Skin Diamond is on display that hour, and for 25 minutes of your time you can talk to her for eight seconds and walk away with an autographed photo. Trust me, it is worth the wait.

You walk between the two rooms which host the expo, and in the hallway you meet Stoya and Dani Daniels, and they are happy to see you even though they don’t know your name. But you are a fan, and the reason why they are there, and they are nice and kind. You step away from them feeling special because you just spoke to the most popular girls in school and they like you, they really do like you! You are one of them right there, at this second, and all the intimacy you have shared while watching their videos translate into this milimetric encounters. You go for a bite and the table next to you has Arabelle Raphael and Kimberly Kane sharing a sandwich, while in a bedroom somewhere, with dimmer lights and less fantasy, two performers are debating Foucault.

Vegas smells of cigarettes and people. Lights are never off. You sit across the table from strangers you know, and suddenly you are stranger than they are. Everyone seems to be high on lights and expectations, like the air is made of these tiny particles of energy. It is easy to want to be illegal here. It is easy to be anyone. And in this intersection between on and off cameras, when asked what you do, you answer “I eat pussy for money”. I write about porn. I do porn. I am porn. Because in Vegas, under all those lights, you are nothing. Until you meet a girl with no make-up and heavy eyes, you are nothing. And after that, every time she catches you looking at her, you become utterly aware that you are nobody under those lights, although your tattoos and your scars prove different. But in Vegas, under all that spectacle and all that make up, your body does not mean much – unless you are a performer. For them, vanity is a requirement to grasp the dynamics of this business and be able to play. Vanity and emotional bond with each other, which is manifested outside the screen in semi-romantic relationships based on mutual understanding and support. You might love them. You might even be loved back. But that kind of friendship you can only experience if, one day, you might perform together.

Male performers get less attention because there are less female fans – and I did miss a gayer crowd around, to tell you the truth. But while you shake hands with Xander Corvus your knees melt, and you understand why he is so good on camera. But you just spoke to Manuel Ferrara and lent three dollars to Dane Cross, so by the time you run into Mick Blue you are not sure who you are anymore, and you just stand there and watch him in silence for the entire night. Do not worry: later you will gather the courage to walk to Woolf Hudson and get a delicious hug and a compliment that will keep you high on self-esteem for the rest of the week.

Nights host people around both Circle bars, and if you sit quietly you can eavesdrop into discourse, identity, boy/girl or girl/girl, and the perfect dick size, and an eventual shout announces someone just made some serious money in the casino. Porn stars talk to each other and make a spectacle of it, forging sexual attractiveness and intensity before the eyes of fans. Mostly men. This is their own private time with their favorite performer, and the level of hope and expectation is unbearable. Eventually, one will come up to a girl and say something to get her attention, but she is already focused on someone else who just entered the circle. This time, it is all about them: not the fans. Fans are allowed to participate only by watching, and the roles are once again back to the familiar place we are used to. Life is back to normalcy. You stand and you watch while the girls make out, sipping on your drink and wondering what it tastes like to be part of the gang. All around you are fans who are sharing that exact same moment in the exact same way, and unless someone pulls you aside to tell you this is real life you can swear you are watching a film.

Until some guy decides to take up the leading role and insists on finding out what your limits are. In his mind, you cannot get mad, though. “It is a porn convention, what did you expect?” The threat of the question echoes in your mind for hours after that, and you debate the social and sexual implications of the porn industry to the level of exhaustion when deep down all you want to say is “I am scared”. But you hold your head up because you are among your peers and they are there for you, and the casino has cameras and security guards all over the place, and that creep cannot get his hands on you – but you do think of other women and how maybe they are not as ironically protected by this same stigma which haunts you, and you fear for them. And that makes you mad, and you wipe your tears and say “The benefit of the doubt is not something someone should have over my body”. Later, you will find your shoes hidden under the blankets and look gorgeous again.

Then the day after it is the awards and the hotel takes longer to wake up and the booths are slowly attracting people as the performers take their places behind the tables with their minds on the prize later at night. Afternoon comes and suddenly Vegas is a desert while hair and makeup is being done. The frantic clicks of flashes is what wakes you up while the red carpet is happening, and for a second you are sure that the aim is you, because nothing escape lenses in that space. Performers and directors and studios all say hello to each other, and it is like an office’s Christmas party, only that it happens in a very, very public manner, and you are socializing with coworkers that you only see once a year, although you do business over the phone the entire time. When the awards actually begin, businesses tend to take a faster pace because the weekend is coming to an end and everybody is talking in hushed, loud voices, sometimes even muffling the winner’s acceptance speech. Later, however, you will see them around the hotel and congratulate them on their award while they are getting a milk shake. You exchange phone numbers and talk about hanging in Los Angeles. The weekend is over.

Of course there are secret parties and millionaire dinners and sex happening everywhere, but unless you step back you cannot see them. In Vegas, you cannot see much because you are inside of it. It was a struggle. It was learning. And I will be back next year, for sure.

Last month I noticed how much I talk about pornography when a friend complained about the monochromatic tone of my conversations: “Not everything is about sex”, she said.

And she was right. Not everything is about sex. But everything is about porn.

Sex as power, as a space for dominance and social interaction, as an economic trading mode, does not exist in the love making format; it comes raw, violent, basal, instinctive, anonymous, and primary as a biological need. It takes places not in the Victorian bedroom we still reproduce in our bourgeois households, but out on the streets, where it can be noticed and acknowledged, accepted or repudiated. From the latest Nic Minaj video to Cronenberg’s (failed) attempt to portray female hysteria, through the endless flirt between Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy: it is all about PORN, not about sex.

Sex is what happens when nobody is looking: porn is its embodied version into something that exists to be noticed, this way positioning participants in a given social economic loci by subjecting them to classification by observance. Sex is to be whispered about, barely noticed, while porn is this over-sized  grotesque body singing loud from TV screens in the broadcasting of cooking shows, soccer games, dance theater: it is all in the body, the human form, the assemble of limbs and muscles and skin, and it is all about pleasuring the taste buds, the eyes, the ears. Pornography is not about sex: sex is about pornography.

The private history of the subject has long become focus of the academic world, inasmuch as it is the primary configuration, the archetype of every process of come-to-being. The limits between the public and private, which appear to be the founding structure of our society, is being now constantly questioned by the use of social media and the internet: no longer I am able to “be” without “being seen”. And, aware of that, one can choose which facade to display: never, or quite rarely, there is a window that allows a peek into their fondness for pornography. While that eroticism is moderately accepted, pornography is dealt with as if deriving from twisted, darkened sexualities which are to be hidden – all this while the world wide web, the same frame which in current society locates the self, continuously bombards users with pornography in its most varied forms.

And while I was thinking about this, it dawned on me that the porn industry might be the most inclusive, most open, and most accepting of all industries, since it allows all sort of minorities to establish in a niche created specifically for them. While that some may argue that there is a ranking system, a price tag which differs to the products of each niche – as in this performer versus that performer, or this category over that one – it is society and consumers, not the porn industry, who ranks them. By allowing all forms of fetish to be equally represented, for example, pornography would be able to bridge private and public on a non-judgmental way, wasn’t it for its consumers denying its consumption. The irony is amusing.

It is in the tension between what is done (inside) and what is spoken (outside) that a solution for the demystification of porn lies. As Michel de Certeau poses, “Through stories about places, they become inhabitable. Living is narativising. Stirring up or restoring this narativising is thus also among the tasks of any renovation. One must awaken the stories that sleep in the streets and that sometimes lie within a simple name.” Let ‘s make it named: porn.

This is an open letter I wrote to my father. As an academic himself, he is able to understand my work; as a father, he debates over whether his only daughter should be dealing with “pornography” at “such an early age”.  I hope this helps him understand how deeply rooted within him social prejudices and categorization tools are.  

The academic world seems to think that pornography is too unrefined, too raw, basic, instinctive, too primary and not rational enough for “men and women of letters”. What they fail to see, however, is that any form of art, any format of art as cultural manifestation has per passed pornography at some point in history, be it writing, sculpture, dancing, painting, cinema, music. Yet, pornography is erased from all art forms that involves nudity and sex the minute the academic world requires justification to allow it in: think of Rubens, and his naked chubby ladies, and how we are immediately taught that it is not about nudity and sex, but about female body adoration; Michelangelo’s David and the denial there is any sexual intention in the portrayal of the masculine body, the work being justified as a semi-mathematical ode to human form and proportion; Rodin’s Kiss being deployed of sexual content, explained as belonging to a realm which goes beyond the physical one, at some point even sublimating his relationship to Camille Claudel by restricting it exclusively to the artistic realm. By eliminating pornography from art pieces it becomes acceptable to observe it, to debate it, to enjoy it, because an art which would aim at sexually arousing people is immediately regarded as less valid than arts which appeal to less carnal senses.

Carnal relationships are understood as being less noble than love, spiritual, or even intellectual ones. However, what signifies a relationship that belongs exclusively to one of those spheres to one person, for another might blur boundaries and penetrate more than one of those territories, this way working in double reference and functioning as sexually arousing at the same time that it holds some other significance. For these people – to whom sex and sexual desire are intrinsically connected to other less “mundane” aspects, such as relational skills, intellect, or even religious experiences – to dichotomize sexual arousal from other interests becomes impossible. For these same people, however, the secondary aspect of the artistic intention works as a solvent to the pornographic tone of the artistic matter, if so they wish, and they are able to justify the sexuality in their art under the scope of other sciences.

Sexual art, on the other hand, holds its place inside the academic world as a matter to be approached only under the lenses of other disciplines: sociology, psychology, history, all disciplines can be asked to harbor pornographic art under their scope, if this means securing the place of those works inside the academic debate. Therefore, photographs by Nan Goldin, for example, are constantly justified as being an account of contemporary sexuality, often being taken only as registers of the sexual atmosphere of a certain time and place. Di Cavalcanti’s mulatas are supposed to represent an emerging Brazilian culture, which intentionally promotes the Brazilian woman as a means of reinforcing a national identity. Dash Snow’s “F*** the Police” should represent the ever going clash between power and sex. And, if everything else fails, the naturalist argument that “there is nothing wrong with flesh” comes into action, as to eliminate any underlying meaning of sexual provocation. It is as if the idea of sex or nudity as a sexual arousing tool tinted any art piece, draining its artistic value and relegating it to a category of intentionality that does not comply with that which is expected from the ”fine arts”. After all, art’s objectives should tangent exclusively spiritual elevation, and never, ever inflict body reactions to its observers – or at least not physical reactions which would remind them or their own condition as irrational, impulsive, instinctive animals.

In a Platonic concept of ideal world, where arts is a threat permanently confronted with the necessity to be censored and regulated in order to formulate good citizens – remember, Plato proposed sending poets and playwrights out of his ideal Republic – the state’s interference in artistic endeavors would work more like a tool to eliminate or belittle the power of the arts to influence, and potentially to corrupt. In a Foucauldian analysis of all “neoliberal governmentality” and the institution of inner-regulatory strategies, aligned with the standardization and normatisation of sexuality, sexual acts, expectations, and what is acceptable to desire, would function as a much more solid regulatory tool. In other words, it is by installing a regulatory apparel inside each active citizen that a system is able to secure that any threat is immediately eliminated by the same subjects it intends to corrupt. Therefore, to perpetrate ideas of what is “normal” or “healthy” sexuality and, at the same time, to impose locale in which the expression of sexual desire should be delivered is a way to make sure that people would reprimand any form of artistic expression which does not comply with said rules.

The academic world, therefore, presents itself as a perfect space for the categorization and dissection of erotic and pornographic art, embedded in pseudo-intellectual pre-concepts of what is art and what only mediates social discourse. It is about time the academic community worldwide understands that pornography is as a valid form of art as any other, and the fact it emerges so instinctively to all societies should, alone, advocate for the need of facing pornographic artistic expressions as valid and subject to deep intellectual analysis. Without, I beg, over extending it to find hooks where to peg more moral issues in order to hide it from the faint-hearted.

On Brazilian porn (part 1)

Many thanks to Christian Madsen, without whom this article would still be a draft. 

If you are a woman, just mutter the words “I am Brazilian” and watch as heads turn and people look at you under a different light. There is no escape: Brazilian women are regarded differently from any other nationality when it comes to sex, and the reason does not rest on Brazilian porn. Or does it?

One of the first porn films I watched was one of Buttman’s adventures in Rio. I remember back then – still a teenager and with no idea I would somehow work with the porn industry – to be uncomfortable not with the sex, but with the way Brazilian women were portrayed in the film. The scenes bordered women abuse not in the nature of the sexual content presented, but in the positioning of the performers in relation to each other and to the roles they were developing. There was some kind of veiled violence that had nothing to do with the roughness of the sexual act, but still underlined all movements, utterances, and visual aspects of the film. It looked as if the women were being punished for being Brazilian, as if they were being treated as less than, say, American counterparts would be under the same circumstances.

It wasn’t until I started reading about post colonialism and subaltern colonization that it all made sense to me. Social constructs that go back to the colonial era are strongly influenced by the phallocentric prejudice that classifies “native” women as passive and inferiors. In fact, many of the representations of the female “native” figure in literature and art perpetuate the myth of the erotically overcharged female: the exotic gives room to the erotic, and the unknown, dangerous body represents a threatening jungle that contains too many dark secrets and must be ravished. Add to that the correspondence between the land and the female body – where invading the latter would consolidate conquering the former, a common practice with the invasion of a land eventually leading to the raping of its women – and you have “the parallel between the relationship man-woman and the relationship empire-colony or colonizer-colonized [which] has often been cited in postcolonial theory as well as the “double colonization” of women in colonial situations.” (VIJOEN, 1996).

We must recognize that imperialism is essentially a form of patriarchy that diminishes any opportunity for identity formation in its subjects. In other words, the vertical structure of a patriarchal structure limits action of any Others – women, mostly. However, the subjugation generated in that kind of pornography blurs gender and race borders: it involves both racial inferiority and the belittling of female sexuality. In Gayatri Spivak’s terms, epistemic violence results when in (post)colonial discourse, the subaltern is silenced by both the colonial and indigenous patriarchal power. (SPIVAK, 1992) In the neocolonialism practiced inside the adult industry, the female indigenous body is suppressed by both a masculine and a colonizer’s body; that is to say, the double oppression gender – race places her on the lower hierarchical levels, reducing her to an object which would lose to no other in any rank – not even to the American woman herself.

My question is: WHY does this happen? Is it just a consequence of the economic differences between countries, or is it a result of a way of perceiving sexuality, and mostly, Brazilian female sexuality? Is there any possibility of re-inscription as a subaltern to the female agent, or is she doomed to be under dominance of both male and white race forever? By inhabiting a space which is violent and marked by ultimate physical degradation, could the Brazilian woman speak?

In Foucault’s analysis of power/knowledge dynamics, an episteme consists of the “unitary body of theory” which tends to privilege some knowledges while it subjugates certain others, ranking them low in its hierarchical paradigm. These disqualified knowledges pose challenges to the power and organization of the dominant episteme by claiming attention to their oppositional emergence. As Hayden White, in his interpretation of Foucault’s tropology has explained, the dominant discursive metaphor of a given community determines both “what can be seen” in the world, as well as “what can be known about it”. Therefore, the results of what can be seen and known about the Brazilian woman is filtered through the Eurocentric patrilineal white male eye.

It was, then, epistemic violence what I saw in that Buttman video. The question of epistemic violence is related to issues such as who produces knowledge, or how power and desire appropriate and condition the production of knowledge. The exploitation of the female body as it is constructed by patriarchy, together with patriarchal values aimed at the victimization of women and the destruction of a female sense of selfhood, has led to the double erasure of the female persona in this kind of adult films because it justifies the permanence of established moral codes which, if shaken, might deconstruct not only social but also economic relations. It is, then, reinstating the colonization process by reinforcing the idea of inferiority based on two axes: one, the female identity; the other, the racial/ethnic difference.

But how does all this play out in films produced in Brazil, by Brazilian directors?

                           Testimonies are held up as exemplar forms of live that have resisted or transcended the strong arm of domination.

- George Yudice

What happens when porn becomes political discourse? Which mechanisms transform footage into spaces of resistance, belonging, and community? Who are the groups that have taken pornography to another level, registering it as their own site of struggle and social recognition? Once published, whatever path taken by a singular individual is transformed into paradigm inside – and out – the group they belong to. The technical reproducibility of modernity, aligned with an emergence of testimony as a genre of discourse, cast light on social actors who are now protagonist of their own history, albeit once silenced by normative social regulations such as alterity. In Postcolonial times, the Other is in me. And in this forged identity of subaltern and excluded groups, social and economic structures are being transformed.

In a society in which the post-utopic is distopic, marginalized groups must rely on alliances with mainstream and alternative media to attempt at the eradication of stereotypes and prejudices. Their condition as citizens is in itself the questioning of the process of construction of their own identities: to be accepted as social subject, the marginalized must promote a self-displacement that generates a radical change in society’s perspective in order to claim any rights on the construction of their identities. Thus, the creation of an autobiographical discourse must follow strict protocol to be regarded as contemporary testimonies of historic realities. However, when such realities have been written on the body, a shift in strategy must come into action: bodies are now modifiable, generating possibilities of new identity constructions. This new body, in constant mutation, now represents what Stuart Hall dubbed a “mobile celebration” (HALL, 1987): it refutes fixed, essential, permanent identities, being formed and transformed continuously in relation to the ways in which we are represented or challenged in the cultural systems that surround us.

Political contemporary identities are essentially constructed based on gender matters (KRAUSE, 1996). When gender is liquid, it becomes impossible to be contained in one or two receptacles, giving birth to new identities which are as fluid as they are interchangeable. Since a neoliberal politics aiming at inclusive societies would be a contradiction, as the differences which defy the universalization of consumption patterns constitute one of neoliberalism’s most dreaded nightmares, such identities pose as a threat to the maximization of profit, creating new groups of consumption directed at the ratification of such newborn identities. In other words, what Ruth Benedict foresaw becomes reality: the market depends on marginalized groups to form new area of consumption which, by their turn, will demand new products aimed at what they expect to be an inclusive social tool, at the same time that said products solidifies the marginal aspect of such groups and demands.

Nevertheless, some “outcast” groups have found in pornography a way through which they can challenge social stigmas, such as compulsory heterosexualization and binary gender dichotomy. Having operated for ages on the assumption of the existence of two genders and multiple sexualities, the porn industry now faces a plurality of genders being presented not as complementary or secondary identities, but as the core for a large amount of groups and consumers without any hint of the system of punishment and reward expected to be found in stereotypes which are reproduced and repeated. No longer does being “different” mean remaining unknown, secluded, made mute by normative expectations; nor is it to be celebrated as a “positive” mark of difference which, nonetheless, still keeps the different at bay . On the contrary, it is to be dealt with as if there was no difference at all. This identitarian normatization happens not as a result of mainstream oppression, but as a true form of inclusion: by eradicating differentiation strategies, it has become possible to promote “alternative” gender identifications inside the pornographic industry and market it not as different, but as same. The neoliberal dilemma, thus, is solved: these new fluid identities have found a loop hole in the system, and returned to society a product which society is unable to refute as marginal.

And it is under this light that works of artists such as Buck Angel, Nica Noelle’s TransRomantic studio, Loren Rex Cameron, to name a few, have found space inside the pornographic industry to exist without being excluded. Ironically, it was the suppression of the mark which distinguished one group from all others what originated a new space of resistance, inclusion, and valorization of such identities. Not only the porn industry has a lot to gain – and to learn – from the newcomers: society as a whole must understand that different means equal, after all.