We thank Gayle Rubin for her critique of the Introduction to our volume, The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of Producing Pleasure.
We take her point seriously but feel it misrepresents our text. We appreciate the opportunity to clarify our argument and to engage the questions that Rubin has raised, because they are crucial to the feminist debates about sexuality, pornography, and sex work that our book addresses.
A Response to Gayle Rubin's critique by Tristan Taormino, Constance Penley, Celine Parrenas Shimizu, and Mireille Miller-Young; FPB Editors
Rubin begins her critique by pointing out the unfortunate framing of our text in the February 23, 2013 piece by Salon author Tracey Clark-Flory, whose headline states, “The feminist pornographer: Tristan Taormino, editor of a new book on X-rated activism, says it’s time to find a middle ground in the porn wars.”
Rubin argues that both the Salon article and our book’s introduction promote the distorting mythology of a "missing middle ground" between two extreme sides in the feminist sex wars. She seizes on Flory’s claim that our book is “an attempt to elevate that reasonable center.”
Tristan never said, “it’s time to find a middle ground in the porn wars” (that was a headline provided by Salon's editors). We don't call ourselves, the contributors, the book, or the feminist porn movement a “reasonable center”— nor do we want to elevate that center.
This is Clark-Flory's interpretation. As Rubin acknowledges, Tristan pushed back against the Salon reporter’s attempt to cast us as the “reasonable middle” and the pro-sex feminist position as uncritical. Reporting on pornography tends to be framed as having two "sides,” often caricatured as extreme, and as a result, simplifies the claims of each side. And, as in our case, that reporting often leaves a lot of the important discussion and context on the editing room floor. It should not be surprising that, as Rubin suggests, the article failed to present a thorough history and analysis of pro-sex feminism.
Rubin also acknowledges that our introduction very much situates The Feminist Porn Book within the forty-year-long movement of pro-sex or sex positive feminism, and that we do cite many of the participants, conferences, and publications that were vital to this movement in the 1970s and 80s. But she then claims that we have reduced the complexities of sex positive feminism in order to present ourselves as offering a new and original stance on the porn/sex wars.
Rubin refers to this passage from the introduction of our book:
One of the unfortunate results of the porn wars was the fixing of an antiporn versus a sex positive/pro-porn camp. On one side, a capital P “Pornography” was a visual embodiment of the patriarchy and violence against women. On the other, Porn was defended as “speech,” or as a form that might someday be transformed into a vehicle for women’s erotic expression. The nuances and complexities of actual lower case “pornographies” were lost in the middle. For example, sex positive thinking does not always accommodate the ways in which women are constrained by sexuality...Hence, for us, sex positive feminist porn does not mean that sex is always a ribbon tied box of happiness and joy.
In this section of the introduction to the book, we are talking about two structural binaries that, as legacies of the sex wars, overlap and operate at once.
In the first binary, between sex positive and anti-porn feminism, we clearly align ourselves with sex positive feminism, but also say that sex positive feminism does not always confront issues of “sexual constraint.”
The forms of constraint we were thinking about have to do with questions of race, class, normative gender and ableist sexuality, and sexual labor. In our attempt to critically address a now-entrenched media fostered caricature of sex positive feminism (as if it says “sex is always a ribbon tied box of happiness and joy”), we call attention to the ways that sex positive feminism does address complex issues of sexual constraint but could emphasize even more the role of racial difference, class inequality, transgender and other non-normative embodiment, and sex work in contemporary porn. The selection of contributors to our book was meant precisely to confront these issues and to show how contested and productive pro-sex feminist porn can be.
In the second binary, we note that antiporn feminists characterize pornography as monolithic and homogeneous. Opponents of antiporn feminism meanwhile have characterized pornography as diverse and heterogenous, in that it includes the expression of, and possibilities for, a range of desires and practices mobilized in multiple, layered, and complex ways.
However, while noting this tremendous diversity and productive potential, sex positive feminist critics have not yet fully analyzed the tremendous production of feminist pornographies that has emerged in the past fifteen years. When we say these pornographies have been “lost in the middle,” we mean that critical work on emerging forms of feminist pornography needs to be engaged if we want to continue to advance the cause of sex positive feminism. That’s what our book is intended to do.
The groundbreaking scholarship on gender and sexuality by academics like Gayle Rubin in the 1970s and 1980s made possible the critical insights of feminist sexuality scholarship today. Thirty years later the intellectual and activist contributions of feminist porn producers and scholars both draw on and contribute new insights to that tradition.
The Feminist Porn Book mobilizes these insights to challenge entrenched and enduring binary thinking about sexuality and pornography. In this context, our perhaps unadvised use of the word “middle” is seized upon to reinforce the binaries our book means to explode. By highlighting the critical interventions of today’s feminist pornographers, porn scholars, and sex activists, and by bridging academic and popular audiences, we want to ignite a conversation about how the battles of the past remain relevant, but are also being transformed in the face of a changing industry and sexual politics.
In solidarity,
Constance, Mireille, Celine, and Tristan
Constance Penley is Professor of Film and Media Studies and Co-Director of the Carsey-Wolf Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Mireille Miller-Young is a Professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Filmmaker and film scholar
Celine Parreñas Shimizu is a Professor of Film and Performance Studies in the Asian American, Comparative Literature, Feminist and Film and Media Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Tristan Taormino is author, editor, columnist, sex educator, speaker, and feminist filmmaker.
---Thanks to The Feminist Porn Book's editors, and Gayle Rubin, for allowing me to reprint their written correspondence. I'm one of the 29 contributors to the Book, with a story called "The Birth of a Blue Movie Critic." - SB
