By Christopher Baum
Even a superficial perusal of recent discussions in the media about pornography would have us believe that porn is, in many regards, a risky business. Some argue that the consumption of porn is reaching “epidemic” proportions, that viewers are at risk of becoming addicted, or that it may encourage dangerous proclivities and the imitation of “unsafe” sexual behavior. Most recently, a referendum in Los Angeles made condom use mandatory for all pornography produced within the city, a move that has been both lauded as a progressive step for performer safety, and critiqued as ploy to evacuate the porn industry from California. Others have regarded the production of pornography as coercive, and it’s meaning inherently misogynistic.
In sum: the forms and formats of pornography are rapidly changing, the industry itself is undergoing major infrastructural changes, and the ubiquity of porn is taking on new meanings in American culture. So where do we begin when considering the many sides to these issues? What kinds of risks does pornography introduce, and for whom? For the inaugural posting of Bodies on the Line, I was thrilled to sit down with close friend, pornstar, and author Lorelei Lee to think through some of these issues. An articulate and talented veteran of the industry, Lee offered her first-hand insights into important questions of risk, consent, and testing within the adult film industry. Here’s to many more thought-provoking and critical engagements on these issues!
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Christopher Baum: So Lorelei! What have you been doing?! Perhaps for people who aren’t familiar with your work, why don’t you talk a bit about your career, and some of your recent projects both porn-related and not-porn-related?
Lorelei Lee: Yes! So, I’ve been in the adult industry since 1999 when I shot my first porn, which was for “The Internet.” [Laughs] At the time it was just still photographs and audio. I still find it hilarious that they did audio – that’s never really been a thing, right?
CB: Wait, back up. They had audio linked up to still images!? Hilarious!
LL: Yeah! [Laughs] It was me telling a dirty story, which of course they fed to me! [Laughs] But I’ve been making porn for about thirteen years; a really long time…and I also have worked as a stripper. But is that part of your research, or this website?
CB: Well, my hope is to have contributors involved in all kinds of sex work. Performers like you, but also people doing research in public health or anthropology who work with sex workers (on a global scale).
LL: Oh great! So very briefly, I’ve been making porn for thirteen years and I’ve worked in San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, and L.A. – but mostly L.A. and San Francisco. I’ve done a lot of BDSM porn [an overlapping acronym for Bondage and Discipline (BD), Dominance and Submission (DS), Sadism and Masochism (SM)], and I’ve also done a lot of mainstream so-called “straight” porn. I’ve also made a lot of queer porn, and have written a lot about being a third-wave feminist pornographer. I’ve done a little bit of directing of pornography and I’ve also worked as a stripper at bachelor parties and that kind of thing.
In addition to that I just got my MFA from New York University and a lot of my writing deals with the adult industry; I’ve written some articles, some essays talking about feminism and pornography and also talking about health and pornography. I guess I’m a little bit of an activist in that capacity.
CB: Amazing!
LL: Another thing that is kind of interesting is that I was going to testify in an obscenity trial for John Stagliano in 2010 regarding some videos that I was in. These were indicted as “obscene” and I was going to testify about them…partly about the health and safety requirements around making those images, as well as talking about the aesthetics of porn, and why they’re not “obscene.”
CB: Can you mention what the case was about for people who don’t know what happened with Stagliano?
LL: So…the federal government indicted John Stagliano’s company for distributing videos made by a few different directors. Some of them were fetish videos, and some of them were enema videos and that kind of thing. But they were very mainstream compared to other porn videos that have been indicted as “obscene” in the past. Under Bush the FBI created a Task Force on Obscenity and this was one of the last cases before Bush left office. I think they’ve de-prioritized it since then. If they had won their case it would have been very significant and set a precedent that would have obstructed many, many things that are freely looked at by consenting adults.
CB: Interesting. There have been a lot of these moments like that. The 1986 Meese Commission, and the debates with Dworkin and MacKinnon.
LL: Yeah, where the government really starts to focus on porn and thinks that it’s a giant problem. I think a lot of people don’t realize that imagery made by consenting adults is still indicted. The government is still trying to make rules about what you can look at. We are not talking about child pornography; we’re not talking about snuff films [i.e. when an individuals is killed on-camera during a sexual act]; we’re not talking about anything that is non-consensual. We’re talking about consenting adults.
CB: So was that, sort of, your impetus to go and testify with him?
LL: Yes! It was definitely frightening for me because if the case had been lost and the films had been classified as “obscene” my part in them comes into question. The lawyers that I spoke with said that, “Certainly the government has not prosecuted performers in many years, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t.” So, it was frightening. And John, who is a friend, could have gone to prison for the rest of his life! At the time his wife was pregnant, now he has two kids, but they would have taken away not only his entire life savings, they also would have put him in prison for doing something that is really…a record of joy!
That’s what was really frustrating: John is a very thoughtful person and a very ethical person, and has done some soul searching around the work that he does making porn. He’s been in the business for a very long time, and he has thought about these ideas long before his prosecution. He’s thought a lot about “What is porn? Why do we put it out into the world?” You know, there was a time when someone asked him if what he was doing was right…if he really felt that it was okay [to participate in the production of pornography]. [John] has made a lot of anal movies, which was kind of what he became famous for….and he really thought about this question, and he said, “You know, what I’m doing is showing people their a**holes and that is a really important and powerful thing for people to see!” [Laughs] I think that’s true! Sexuality is something that people have so much shame around, and pornography explores the parts of people’s minds that they keep under lock and key a lot of the time.
CB: [Laughs] Related to this question of consent, I might jump ahead for one second…I’ve been reading all of the stuff coming out around [the mandatory use of condoms for pornography produced in L.A.], particularly the work that you’ve been writing. There was one comment you made that said that porn is consensual, but a lot of people do not see it that way. This may be getting too off topic, but I feel like that is something that people are concerned or threatened by.
Considering also the effects that porn has on the part of the viewer – if what we watch doesn’t influence us then how do we explain issues like body image? You know, women read Cosmo and they think that they need to be thin. These are two different questions, about consent and influence, but do we want to tackle those? I think it opens up the question of health/safety beyond that of performers; it’s a bigger question.
LL: It is certainly a bigger question because it is definitely about body image and the effect of pornography on people’s attitudes toward sex. That is very much about health! And about mental health, and about the way that we take care of our bodies, and whether we take care of our bodies or not is often based on our self-image. I think that these questions are really important.
But I think that we can’t have these conversations if we come from different places concerning the question of consent. If you, or someone, believe that my participation in a video is non-consensual…our conversation will never meet because they will never accept that my experiences are valid. Or if people feel that they are compelled to watch porn in an addictive way – that they are “under the influence” of it, that they don’t choose what to watch and when to watch it. That’s a completely different conversation. My feeling is that for the majority of people who watch pornography, it is a part of their lives that they have control over. Certainly I’m not going to deny people’s experiences of addiction! But that’s a very separate category; I think that for most of the people who look at porn it is part of their sex lives. And they can choose what kind of porn they watch.
So this question of body image, and whether pornography is harmful to the viewer is a very important one. If you believe that pornography is harmful to the viewer, first of all you have to ask why? Often times the arguments that are made that pornography portrays misogynistic attitudes toward women; that it shows women being exploited and it then influences male viewers to exploit women or to have misogynist attitudes. [As the argument goes], this encourages women to be exploited because they think it’s what makes them sexy, or encourages them to be submissive without being in control over their submission to men.
Now, if you think that’s true about porn I make a couple of arguments. My first argument is that if there is pornography that shows this imbalance of power in a non-consensual way, that is a symptom of the society in which its made, and not of pornography as a genre. The evidence for that is everywhere…it is in women’s magazines, it is in mainstream movies that constantly show this non-consensual power dynamic between men and women. The response to that is (or should be) to make more porn, not to make less porn. If you ban pornography entirely, then you’re basically saying that images of sexuality are wrong. A better response is to create images that show sexuality in all its dimensions. For many of the companies I’ve worked for, that is exactly what they are trying to do: respond to bad porn with better porn. [Laughs]
Lee in a studio portrait for Kink.com
And then this question of “what an image means” also comes up a lot. My feeling is you can’t take an image from a porn movie out of context. You can’t take an image and say it has meaning without [the viewer] already giving it that meaning. I’m trying not to be too theoretical or vague here. People will sometimes take an image from a BDSM film in which a woman is playing the submissive role to a man and say: “This shows women in a non-consensual, lower-power dynamic to men. Women can’t possibly consent to this!” But if you look at that image in context, for example, if you watch a video from kink.com [a well-known producer of BDSM pornography located in San Francisco] in which you see the negotiation beforehand you see that the woman actually has control of the situation. She’s saying exactly what she will and won’t do in the scene, she has her “safe-word” that she can call at any time. The entire scene happens because she says it can happen. [In this context] that image has a completely different meaning; the roles are reversed.
CB: For people who haven’t seen the videos from kink.com, do you want to describe a bit more about those interviews?
LL: When [kink.com does] these interviews, they’re taking an idea that has been apart of the BDSM community for many, many years. That is this idea of negotiation. Before you do a scene, you set up the rules of the scene and [the each of the scene partners] will say what they want to do in the scene and they’ll say what they don’t want to do in the scene. The things they don’t want to do are called “limits.” People have “hard limits” (things that they will never do), and “soft limits” (you know, things that they are scared of, but might be interested in trying sometime). It gets very intricate in terms of what people talk about…it can be a very long conversation.
And at Kink they do an ending video as well where people talk about what happened during the scene and how it felt for them. The thing is: every porn company that I’ve ever worked for has had a similar kind of structure where they will ask you beforehand what you want to do that day. They’ll tell you everything they want to do and you have the opportunity to say yes or no to any of those things. That conversation starts before you’re even booked for a scene. I think its very frustrating when people talk about porn being exploitative or being non-consensual because I think most people have no experience talking about what they want sexually. What they want to do in a sexual encounter. Whereas in porn: that’s all we ever talk about! “What do you do? What don’t you do? What are you never going to do!? What are you interested in, but scared of?” We’re constantly communicating. This is true for even the stupidest porn…you know…the worst porn in my mind, which is gross, misogynistic…where the people who are making the films actually are misogynists! Even then, you have these conversations making sure that everything is consensual.
And part of the reason for that is very obvious and very capitalist. Which is: porn is better if the people that are in it want to be there! They make better movies! [Laughs]