10 Classic Porn Movies Directed by Women
I have never been a good historian, at least in the traditional sense of the word. I hate reading about war, but war is only one lens through which we can study the past. History is literally just what happened, and wars are not the only thing that happened. Almost any cultural phenomenon or artistic movement can serve as a historical lens, including obscenity.
By studying the history of pornography and watching films from the Golden Age , one can gain a deeper understanding of how the state uses decency as a weapon, and understand how the pioneers of obscenity made free speech much freer. You can also use porn as a lens to learn about the history of organized crime, the FBI, and how fickle the concepts of “good guy” and “bad guy” are.
You will also learn a lot about how women are treated under capitalism.
In a vacuum, no sexual act is wrong as long as the sexual act is enjoyed by consenting, enthusiastic adults. The same applies to the depiction of these sexual acts on film. But porn is not made in a vacuum, and as with any job, the experience of women working in pornography varies greatly. Sex work is decent work and women can be exploited in any area, but the very nature of the work can make any exploitation more tangible. (It is worth noting that the “legitimate” film business is hardly free from sexual exploitation and abuse .)
People aren’t as quick to praise #girlboss as they were five years ago, but the idea that putting a woman in charge will lead to a fairer and more equitable workplace persists, and it’s like porn made by women, if not for women, naturally. it would be more ethical. But women are not immune to the influence of racism, sexism, transphobia and classism and cannot escape the realities of capitalism. Women are more likely to recognize the specialized oppression their gender as a whole faces; they are also more likely to sympathize with these instances of oppression. But there is no guarantee that a woman will write, direct or produce more progressive pornography (or any other art for that matter).
However, viewing classic pornography “made” by a woman gives us an interesting (albeit sexy) lens through which to look at the past. One immediately becomes disillusioned with the idea that “putting a woman in charge” makes films more far-sighted, feminist sex films, but – in many cases – you can see the impact of the attitude of the woman who made the film (for better or for better). worse). Considering that second-wave feminism wasn’t exactly sex worker friendly—pornography was one topic that feminists of the time and the religious right could agree on—it’s no surprise that much of the porn of the 70s and early 80s doesn’t fit. requirements. progressive or feminist standard (although some pass the Bechdel test).
I usually choose porn based on actors (actual industry workers) – anything with Jamie Gillis, R. Bola, Lisa De Leeuw, Herschel Savage, Sharon Mitchell, Andrea True or Veronica Hart usually gets in line. — and I’ve only recently started focusing on directors. Firstly, it’s quite difficult to keep track of who directed what, because, with the exception of big names – Pachard, Damiano, Lincoln, the Mitchel brothers, etc. – many directors directed under pseudonyms. Finding porn filmed by women is even more difficult. I reached out to Ashley West of theRialto Report via a Twitter direct message to see if he could point me in the right direction, and he confirmed that finding early porn with a “real female lens” is not easy.
“Golden Age porn had a few female directors, but very few of them brought a genuine female lens to the genre until Candida Royale made it her raison d’être in the mid-1980s,” he wrote. “Before that, the most prolific directors on the East Coast were people like Roberta Findlay and, to a lesser extent, Doris Wishman. They were both personally uncomfortable around other women and surrounded themselves with men, so they were unlikely to be role models as female directors. The west coast was home to the likes of Ann Perry, Summer Brown, and Svetlana (although the latter two worked closely with their filmmaker husbands, so it’s hard to know what their personal contribution was). And then there were actresses like Annette Haven or Claire Dia. who made occasional films but didn’t stay long behind the camera” (You can’t always trust the credits either: sometimes, as West noted, women were considered directors even if they had nothing to do with directing a film. “That’s a frustrating aspect of the golden age. that it took women so long to be taken seriously as directors,” West wrote.)
Porn doesn’t have to be created by good role models to be good porn, and these early films featuring women are still worth watching. Sex aside, it might seem like there’s no overlap between Roberta Findlay’s more caustic work and Candida Royale’s softer romantic stories, but you can trace the dialogue, scenes, and jokes that are unmistakably colored by the experience of fucking as a woman in both of them. their work. (Or maybe I’m reading this too much; I’ve watched a lot of porn.)
It’s fun to watch people get fucked in a movie, no matter who wrote and directed the scenes, and the next 10 movies are fun, or at least fun to discuss. Here they are, in no particular order: a bunch of vintage skin films written and/or directed by women, imperfections and all.