How women are changing the face of porn
KELLY Shibari moved from Japan to the US aged 15 to attend college, toured as a roadie for rock bands and Broadway shows after graduation, and settled in Los Angeles, where she built a career as a film production designer.
But in 2007, Hollywood writers went on strike, and work dried up.
Shibari wondered how to make ends meet, when a friend dangled an idea: What about… porn?
“My first reaction was, ‘There’s no fat girls in porn’,” Shibari said.
“And there were definitely no fat Asian girls. The stereotype of Asians in porn is that they’re long and lean and not curvy,” she said. “That’s how white Americans see Asian sexuality.”
Defying those conventions worked to Shibari’s advantage, and she staked a claim to a growing niche. By 2016, she had become the first plus-size model featured in Penthouse.
But that recognition came after years of Shibari and other adult entertainers pushing against the industry’s boundaries.
Performers of her size were typically cast in fetish scenes that emphasised their weight – “feeding or gaining or squashing or face sitting,” as she put it.
Sex
Shibari was more interested in sex. So she started making and distributing her own films. “Doing porn, was never about politics. I wasn’t trying to break any barriers. I just wanted a good time.”
And to make money. She found both when striking out on her own.
Shibari’s story, of economic crisis spawning creative solutions, is a familiar one in the porn industry, which is looking less and less like an industry these days.
Amateurs are flooding the internet; piracy has addled the once-dominant studios; production has atomised and scattered.
But along the way, something happened: women are rising up.
“The decentralisation of the industry is giving workers more power,” said Heather Berg, a gender studies lecturer at the University of Southern California who studies labour issues in pornography.
“It’s easy to produce and distribute your own content so workers are less dependent on the boss.”
That means performers can now run their own shows. The rise of webcam work has opened up a style of performance that can be totally controlled by the model in her bedroom.
The accessibility of film cameras, alternative hosting sites and webcam tools like Skype have made way for a wider range of sexual and gender representations. And social media has given women a voice offscreen, where they’re puncturing mainstream stereotypes while calling out destructive industry practices.
“Since the recession, we’ve seen this giant influx of women who are older, college educated and have backgrounds in business,” said Shibari, who works as a marketer. “Now we have these empowered women who want to speak up.”
Queer
Take Pink and White Productions, run by director Shine Louise Houston. In her time working for a sex shop, she had noticed a lack of queer material, so she decided to direct her own. In her first film, Crash Pad (2006), she cast Jiz Lee, a nonbinary artist and porn novice, to star.
“I had always been interested in sex work, but I didn’t think I could do it without changing myself to present more in line with mainstream aesthetics – how I looked and how I had sex.”
Lee has since performed in many of Houston’s films, and now manages marketing for Pink and White.
These days, “we’re seeing more trans people in porn, people of colour, queer people, people of size, older people, people with disabilities,” Lee said. “We have a much more expansive vision.”
The rise of webcams has meant a boon in one-woman shops that can accommodate endless performances.
“I tend to not maintain the standard of beauty that the industry is looking for,” said Ingrid Mouth, who started performing on webcams when chronic illness made it difficult for her to sustain her career as an illustrator.
This creative disruption isn’t contained to explicitly feminist and queer productions.
There is a growing sense that there is no bright line between feminist material and mainstream material.
Pornographic actresses are edging into the mainstream media, too, including Stormy Daniels, whose battle with the US president has become national news, and Stoya, who writes thoughtful essays using the lens of porn performance to examine issues of sex education and privacy.
Recently, performer and activist Lotus Lain leveraged Twitter to speak directly to her fans, explaining that she had stopped shooting scenes with men because she was too often cast in racist scenarios.
The increasing visibility of these women has dovetailed with a growing willingness to see sex work as work, and to put its potential exploitations into a larger class framework.
As performer Missy Martinez said on Twitter recently, “People always feel the need to ask porn stars if they ‘like their job’. Dude, you work at Verizon. Are you okay is the real question?” – The New York Times