Feminist Porn on Conan?

Conan recently featured a short about Sweden funding the production of feminist porn. Here is the clip:

The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brein

“Feminist porn is different because it focuses on pleasuring the female.”

I’m glad that mainstream media is starting to bring up that there are other options for porn besides the detrimental crap that saturates the industry. However, quite obviously, he was not representing feminist porn.

Feminist porn is as diverse as feminists themselves: romantic, kinky, adventurous, sweet and everything outside and in between.

I’ve been watching porn since I was a teenager. Blessed and cursed with the internet, I had access to all the free smut a sexually curious Leo could dialup download. Unfortunately the only images in my memory are white women, skinny or toned bodies, fake breasts, shrill screaming, and other detrimental images to my teenage sexual identity.  As I got older and my identity grew farther away from the women and the sex in the porn I had access to, I stopped watching.

I missed it though. The learning, the voyeurism, the analysis, the getting to know porn stars, and again, the learning. Even before I decided to become sexually active, I had committed to myself that I was certainly not going to be having missionary sex on a bed once a week with my partner - no dice.  I just couldn’t bring myself to watch this homogeneous group of people fucking and fake screaming each other.  Eventually I was introduced to porn with people of color, but the majority of what I saw was/is over exotified, downright racist and hurtful.

It wasn’t until I got introduced to the Smitten Kitten that I realized that there is so much more. Well, the industry is still, in my opinion over-saturated with bad porn, BUT the stuff out that is different is really good.

I recently watched Candida Royale’s Afrodite Superstar. It was one of the best porns with people of color I’ve seen. The protagonist Afrodite is working her way through the rap industry and is allowing record executives to mold her into a false hardcore image, when that is far from her organic personality. The film doesn’t have a lot of sex in it, but it does have sweet, mostly romantic, couples sex. I enjoyed the Afrodite critique of today’s rap industry and the false exotified images of street life. There is one character in the film (who doesn’t have any sex) that quotes powerful women like Bell Hooks and Janis Joplin to inspire Afrodite to be herself.

I also am GA-GA for the Comstock Series. It is documentary porn that features a real couple, real bodies, real sex, real orgasms and a connection between the couple that Merel Streep herself couldn’t mimic.  My favorite is Ashely and Kisha: Finding The Right Fit. The film starts with an interview, talking about how they met and the awkward feelings many couples go through when they are feeling each other out - literally (hardy, har). Then they feature a sex scene with the couple. It is so adorable and incredibly hot. You can really see how in to each other the couple is.

Thanks, Conan. Good try, but your porn sucked.