October 21, 2011 · 12:56 pm

Flying into Sodom

by Rich Moreland, October 21, 2011

An icon is powerful. I’m not talking about those little symbols decorating our LCD’s. They’re the navigation instruments that propel us into the cyberspace universe that dictates our lives. The icon I’m referring to is that personage who is the object of adoration, that distinct individual who gives meaning to a cause, an issue, or the history of whatever we’re into at the moment.

There are sports icons, music icons, political icons, icons of every ilk. This includes feminists, but I’m not referring to academicians.  Their job is to lecture at universities and impart their particular world vision to students who absorb their insights, if ever so tacitly. My feminist icons are a wee bit different; they are a part of a feminism that I adore, unabashed pro-sex, pro-woman, pro-fetish, and pro-porn.

I remember meeting my first one, Annie Sprinkle, at an American University conference a few years ago. One of my more liberal students tagged along; we sat through some mildly interesting seminars with the understanding that the final event, Annie’s talk, was the game for us that day.

We got to the auditorium early and I introduced myself to Annie while my Kodak enthusiastic student clicked away. During her talk, Annie was open with her thoughts; spoke of her sexual adventures, her disagreement with the anti-porn radical feminists of the old feminist sex wars, and her current passion for ecosexology. Her watchword was acceptance and love of others and herself, the most important lesson.

Afterward I spoke with Annie again. I had finished a brief bio of her for my research and conveyed it to her via email. I did not expect that she would have read it, but in truth she had and wanted to know why I had not included her victory over breast cancer. It was the first of a handful of kindnesses Annie has sent my way. On that early spring Saturday at a venerable university, she was truly the Annie Sprinkle I anticipated: overflowing with a gentle aura of wisdom that blossomed in the flower child she once was and shapes her philosophy today.

Later in an email to her Cub 90 mates, that feminist support group formed decades ago among a handful adult film actresses, she paid me the ultimate compliment, “He’s one of the good guys,” Annie wrote. I treasure those words.

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A couple of years later I met another feminist icon, Susie Bright. I sought her out at a similar conference just to say “hello.” We had exchanged email communications but this was my first opportunity to actually meet her. Surviving in me is the little boy my mother so assiduously taught to be polite. Into my teenage years when raging hormones directed my attention to female bodies and thoughts of fornication, that politeness reinforced a natural shyness that has made me exceedingly deferential to women. Susie Bright, Annie Sprinkle? Believe me, it took courage.

If you know nothing of Susie’s genius let me recommend two books, both a bit dated but worth your time and what little money you’ll spend. The Sexual State of the Union (1997) is cultural wisdom spiced with political wit. Full Exposure (1999) should be read by anyone who is personally unforgiving of his or her sexual desires. In other words, our personal failure to achieve the erotic happiness that resides in the pantheon of rights we label as human is a tragedy. And that, if I don’t miss my guess, probably includes most of us. What did T.S. Eliot say in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock?” We have,

“And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.”

Yet in the end, he insists, we are often left with a disillusioned life “measured out” with those ever famous literary “coffee spoons.”

A modicum of Susie Bright brilliance is enough to drive me forward in my writing and for this I am grateful. Words are movers of nations on a grand scale and attitudes on a personal one and hers far surpass mine, so I can only issue praise for an intellect and an icon I greatly admire.

In my deference to Susie’s insights, I must pay homage to a thought from Full Exposure. Susie references the tyranny of growing up in a society that remains culturally defined by Victorian sensibilities. She reminds us that from childhood we learn to “’keep our hands to ourselves;’” that “our naked bodies are flawed, that our desires and curiosities are dangerous.” The unmitigated truth of this admonition sucker punches our self-esteem like the country preacher who, to quote Jonathan Edwards, insists that we are sinners who must “fly out of Sodom” before the judgment comes.

Susie Bright is here to persuade us that we are responsible for however we wish to define our sexual self-image and are beholden to that judgment. Her message is bravery. If we can negotiate the tornadic activity of our desires, our sexuality will be swept and delivered into an erotic “Land of Oz” where we can skip along a golden path of alluring smells and touches. And if we are lucky, the Annie Sprinkles of our fantasies will welcome our intimate proclivities, whatever they are, with open arms.

Please read a little bit of Susie. It’s worth your time. I’d like to recommend her latest book, praising without having read a word of it. I have faith in Susie Bright; I know it will be terrific. This time she is trying her hand at a little history in The Erotic Screen, Vol. 1: The Golden Hardcore and the Shimmering Dyke-Core.  It’s Kindle, no paperback version. I’m old school. I like the feel and pleasure of a real honest-to-God book. But I’ve discovered I can put it on my computer.

We’ll see. If I can make it work, I’ll come back with a review.

So, there you have it. Two iconic feminists who, if you pay attention, will nurture your sexuality with words and thoughts that will help you understand exactly how to make it all come together. And if successful, you can fly into Sodom if you dare.

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September 11, 2011 · 7:47 am

Sugar and Spice

by Rich Moreland, September 11, 2011

Bobbi in Toronto

When I walked onto the convention floor during the Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas a couple of years ago I headed directly for the Evil Angel exhibit. In the days when the glitz was held at the Sands Convention Center, the big moneyed studios greeted visitors like upscale strip clubs along an urban block. Aligned in a series of mini-stages strung across the floor, their garish opulence—bright lights, gigantic posters of their stars, loud music, and bar stool-like tables for autographs and photo ops—shouted for attention. For the fan, the drill is whip out the camera and start snapping away then quietly queue up for a moment with a favorite girl.

But I wasn’t there as a fan.

My urgency was to locate Bobbi Starr before her signing time began. She had emailed me earlier to stop by to discuss some ideas on a media presentation she had been asked to do. In fact, other than emails, I had not actually met her in person.

I got to the cordoned off area just beyond the Evil Angel space and waited politely while Bobbi  finished an interview with a Vegas newspaper. I ducked under the rope and slipped her my business card. She smiled and motioned me into the reserved area where we chatted briefly before she invited me to breakfast the next day. I’m certain that my ignoring the company imposed barrier mattered little to anyone there, but I suddenly felt a bit like a kid who sneaked into the ballpark without a ticket. It was kind of cool.

At eleven the next morning, we sat down in her hotel’s café for an extended conversation. She ordered breakfast; her boyfriend nursed a Starbucks coffee. I have become the absent minded professor I found so humorous years ago as an undergrad; I forgot my digital recorder, something Bobbi reminded me of the next time we planned to meet.

“Don’t forget your recorder,” she said with a hint of humor.

So this conversation was a get-to-know-you session, and I had no idea what to expect. The first thing she said caught me off guard.

“Porn is just fantasy.”

“Ok,” I thought. “Why did she say that?”

She didn’t elaborate but probably felt the necessity to educate an academic who was just beginning his investigatory work. Bobbi is perceptive. I fumbled around looking for a way to segue into the feminism topic she mentioned in her email. We continued to talk about a number of things before walking to the convention center for her signing time, a “meet and greet” with her fans.

Bobbi’s boyfriend “SSippi,” as he is known among her friends and fans, said little as is his habit when Bobbi is center stage. On other occasions, he and I have talked while she worked. “SSippi” is instantly likeable and I will tell you about him in a future blog post.

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Fast forward a year and some months later. Breakfast again, this time it’s a cold windy morning in Toronto. Bobbi grants me over an hour of her time and a lot of topics are covered. Had she asked me on that other morning if I understood what she meant by her opening remark, I would have been uncertain of my response. But now I had done enough interviewing to know how she and other adult film performers felt about “fantasy” and their fans.

I have come to understand the authenticity that is Bobbi Starr.  She fervently believes that her fans deserve her attention. She is spot on when she says that men can be fragile and she wants to make them comfortable in her presence. Bobbi got all the right genes, you understand, and this can make her intimidating to the ordinary guy who approaches her at a convention.

The fan has literally has seen all of her having sex with men who can disarm the average man-on-the-street with their physical assets, so easing a fan into casual conversation is important to Bobbi.

She told me some fans email her and admire her for being an empowered feminist in a tough industry; others just say, “I like the way you take things in your holes!” It’s the second response that creates the long lines at trade shows. The world of adult film is, to use her words, “a veritable card catalog of types of fantasies” and porn girls do their best to create a sexual buffet to suit all tastes.

But problems can creep up. Fans get attached. Some send gifts and personal messages. They confuse the “Real” Bobbi with the “Porn” Bobbi. They are separate entities. Adult film is a business, entertainment, and Bobbi has a life beyond the camera.

Her mantra is, “I am not your fantasy. I make your fantasy.”

There is an overpowering difference in those words.

Unfortunately this attitude does not always go down easy with some admirers who, in their private mental world, become possessive and obsessive of a performer. As a result, everything must be finessed. And Bobbi is good at it, very good.

She wants to “blend the fantasy,” as she told me. Bobbi will not “break down” whatever self-defined images of her the fan brings to the table by being rude or unpleasant. Yet sometimes fans can become too insistent on her attention. Those who send her gifts crave  recognition and a few, who believe a gift translates into personal ownership of her time, can become irritating. No matter their attitude Bobbi is respectful, sending notes, thanking them, and offering free website minutes or a DVD for the most generous. With a smile that acknowledges proper upbringing,  she tells me her mother raised her to be polite.

She will not compromise herself for the fantasy. She claims that happens with some girls who forget who they really are and conflate their industry status as porn stars with their personal lives. Bobbi’s goal is to maintain her own person while making her fans feel “wanted and desired” when they talk with her.

Bobbi Starr is an entertainer and a businesswoman.  She has a family that supports her career, a boyfriend with whom she shares that elusive emotion of love,  and colleagues who respect her. She takes political stands within the adult industry on the value of female directors and the need to observe health precautions in filming. Most recently she has been tapped with three others to represent the performers’ view in the new health plan for the industry, Adult Production Health and Safety Services (APHSS).

And, Bobbi is now a director for John Stagliano’s company, a long due recognition of her intelligence  and creativity.

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It is a balancing act, all this finesse, and Bobbi understands how to make it work. She humorously quotes the nursery rhyme about little girls, “sugar and spice and everything nice, that’s what girls are made of.”

I don’t know about all little girls, but I do know Bobbi Starr and she is one remarkable woman.

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August 29, 2011 · 4:51 pm

A Triumph Over an Adolescent Male Mind

by Rich Moreland August 29, 2011

When I discovered there were feminists making adult film I was astounded. Not your mother’s feminism, I assure you. In my limited experience with the women’s movement a feminist was, when it comes to sex, not exactly ready to take on all comers.

My interaction with adult film was equally as limited. My adolescent male mind was focused on the action, not the value of the people who created it, their intelligence, their politics, and their art.

With little prompting, intellectual curiosity got the better of me as it often does. I decided to seriously investigate the adult film business. Rather than living with myths, or what others told me, I wanted to know the people who work in the industry because I suspected they were pretty interesting. This decision was the beginning of the end of my adolescent male mind.

Shortly after beginning my research, I discovered performers who identify as feminists—Nina Hartley, Madison Young, Bobbi Starr, Dylan Ryan, April Flores, Jiz Lee, and Lorilei Lee, to name a few—who are staking out their space in a male-dominated business. And the roll call includes innovative directors like Shine Louise Houston, Courtney Trouble, Tristan Taormino, Nica Noelle, and Carlos Batts, all artists in their own right.

Further investigation revealed I had only scratched the surface because no current feminist in adult film can celebrate her/his craft without paying homage to the past. The pioneers of feminism in adult film, actresses like Annie Sprinkle, Candida Royalle and their sisters from the 1980’s known collectively as Club 90, set the standard for today’s feminism in the industry. They surpassed all expectations of women who made their reputations in adult film. Annie with her performance art, Candida with FEMME productions, Gloria Leonard with her political activism, and the two Veronicas—Vera and Hart—deserve icon status.

So, where did this leave me? I realized how wrong I was in broad brushing feminism. Chalk up a feminist victory over the adolescent male mind.

In truth, I admire the traditional feminist movement for its political and social contributions in changing America’s cultural landscape. Unfortunately, a few decades ago the anti-pornography faction of the broader movement seized the media limelight, preaching an anti-sex, pro-censorship message while decrying the evils of porn. Thus a feminist reputation was created and shaped my reference point on the movement.

I was not alone. My conversations with Candida Royalle revealed that she struggled with reconciling feminism and her on screen career in adult film. She drifted away from the movement when demonizing pornography was feminism’s popular mantra before returning under a pro-sex feminist banner.

As with all movements feminism was not monolithic; factions developed over all sorts of issues. Some feminists disaffected with the movement’s anti-sex direction encouraged a woman’s ownership of her sexuality. They identified as sex-positive feminists and countered the movement’s popular belief that porn promoted harm and degradation toward women. These feminists supported a woman’s right to buy, watch, perform in, and get off on porn if that was her desire. In time, sex-positive feminism gained a foothold in academia and spread to adult film.

Though the earliest of the sex-positive crowd wasn’t real thrilled with Linda Lovelace’s talents in Deep Throat (1972), the film actually celebrates her sexual pleasure. Remember, she is seeking orgasm. But feminists wanted to see the narrative from a woman’s point of view and felt short-changed. Some were not opposed to Lovelace’s performance; they just thought porn/erotica could be made better and more appealing to women.

Beginning in the mid-1980’s that demand became reality and feminism found its place in the pornography industry. Today, the space they own is home to a variety of expressions. To give you an idea, consider the following samples: the erotica of FEMME Productions and Girlfriends Films, the mainstream films of “Porn Valley’s” Tristan Taormino and Belladonna, the edgy genderqueer performances of San Francisco’s Queer Porn Mafia, and the BDSM internet offerings of Kink.com.

Remember, it is all about choice. Everyone’s sexual expression is legitimate and never deserves to be stifled by anyone. So watch an erotic movie if you wish or a hard edge bondage scene if that is your thing. It’s choice and feminist porn celebrates that.

An addendum. Embedded in this venture is a celebration of women’s sexuality that has endorsed each woman’s individual pleasure, regardless of her interest in porn. Businesses like Good Vibrations in San Francisco and Good For Her in Toronto have given women the permission and privacy needed to explore their individual desires. And, no venture into sex-positive feminism is legitimate without mentioning the innovative art space in San Francisco known as Femina Potens.

So, I decided to tell the story of sex-positive feminism in adult film, seeking to discover how modern day feminists in the business got to their present state. In other words, how did veterans like Royalle, Sprinkle—and their close friend, Nina Hartley—spawn the likes of Madison, Bobbi, Jiz, Courtney, and the others listed above? The most effective way to handle that mission was to ask them personally and then tie their stories together with scholarly writings on the subject and the actual history that took place.

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I’m happy to report that my adolescent male mind has morphed into a more mature state and is now feminist oriented, at least the sex-positive kind and its vital connections to adult film. I credit feminist scholar Linda Williams with the academic insight I needed to figure it out. By the way, if you have any inclination to read a brilliant work on the ways to view pornography check out Williams’ books, especially her classic, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible.’” (University of California Press: 1999).

In the meantime, I’ll keep plugging away and just maybe get all this finished so the story is recorded for America’s cultural history.

A final and honest word is in order here. For all you out there who excoriate the adult film business, I understand your views. However as you moralize, criticize, and vilify, consider taking a moment or two to actually sit down and talk with people who work in the business. As a group, they are well-educated, articulate, and very middle class. People very much like you and me.

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August 12, 2011 · 4:28 pm

Hence the Name

by Rich Moreland  August 12, 2011

While I’m enjoying one of those down periods (I’m on hold until a couple of valuable people get back to me on criticisms and revisions of textual stuff), I thought a quick explanation of 3hattergrindhouse might be in order.

Coming up with something unique name-wise that promotes eyeballs to a site is daunting. So, I reverted to my work to find a catchy title and am grateful to a faculty colleague who played with the idea and refined my choice. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the word “grindhouse,” it refers to the legendary adult theater that is contextually important in the storied history of filmed pornography.

Grindhouses have gone the way of rotary phones, though like the printed newspaper, some do survive. Years ago prior to the VCR, many grindhouses were old burlesque theaters that abandoned live shows for film. They became hotbeds of the sexual, at least on film; sleazy emporiums nestled among the neon garishness of urban redlight districts. Grindhouses were the soul of these tawdry and notorious neighborhoods. San Francisco’s “Tenderloin,” Boston’s “Combat Zone,” Baltimore’s “Block” and, of course, Times Square—at least before it was cleaned up—are best known. The most famous of all grindhouses is probably SF’s storied O’Farrell Theater, though the old versions of L.A.’s Pussycat Theater and New York’s Show World probably qualify for that dubious honor.

It was where you went to get off, quite frankly. But times have changed and these days, everyone—male and female alike—uses the internet as their marketplace of sexual entertainment. In fact, it is a personal grindhouse with all the comforts of home, no barker to cajole you, no street hookers to fend off. Modern, clean, and disappears with a click.

Because I love looking at the past and my research is largely historically based, grindhouse seemed a natural moniker for this site. To extend the meaning further, I believe the grindhouse can be a place or a film genre.

The three-hatter is another matter, and it is entirely the matter!

Here’s where it gets a little sticky, pun intended. Movies were informally “evaluated” by grindhouse patrons who, by custom and common etiquette, did not sit in front of, beside, or behind each other. The paying customers were known in the old days as the “raincoat crowd” for obvious reasons (they still exist, a topic for another day). Decades ago most males wore hats and the fedoras and chapeaus conveniently served a vital purpose during the movie. In other words, a bad movie was a no-hatter, a fair one a one-hatter, and two-hatters were pretty good. Of course, the best of all movies were known as three-hatters, a supreme compliment considering that every male’s explosive sexual response requires a refractory period to get going again.

There you have it.

How does it apply to this blog? As I suggested, the grindhouse is indeed a genre of its own and the people who produce adult film are a community all their own. In the coming weeks and months I hope to tell you about some interesting people and how they feel about their industry and their art.

One caveat. I’m no film critic. Quite frankly, I spend very little time watching pornography unless it has some recognized artistic value. The adult industry produces thousands of movies annually and titles like Gangbanged Harem Sluts 7 or Fat Buttz Anal (Just made those names up. Don’t go looking on the internet!) are unlikely to draw my attention unless they feature performers  I know personally.  What I see comes either at film festivals where presentations are often snippets or vignettes, or movies recommended to me by the people who make them.

So don’t expect movie reviews. That’s not my thing. The business of adult film—its history, legal and health issues, and of course, its people—are what I prefer.

I will keep you informed along the way.

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August 6, 2011 · 12:49 pm

Getting Started

by Rich Moreland  August 8, 2011

Through the encouragement and insistence of those who have given me valuable advice, I’ve started a blog. I don’t rant and rave (at least in print), so topics will be handled with an appropriate dignity considering the ire they may stir up among some people.

I’m an educator and researcher studying the adult industry, particularly issues surrounding the empowerment of female performers, the way adult film is made, health concerns, and the like. I’ve met some interesting people and find those who work in adult entertainment to be engaging intellectually and socially. As I’ve said in print, they are unremarkable people (In other words, they’re just like your neighbors or all those people you went to school with. Everyday people.) working in a quite remarkable industry.

So, if you have any interest in following my thoughts on my research, please feel free. Because I’m putting a book together, editing, rewriting, checking documentation, and working with assistants takes a world of time, so I’ll get to blogging when I can.

I have twitter and facebook accounts but rarely do anything with either. I promise the blog will not fall victim to the same neglect.

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