Anita Chaudhuri Annie Sprinkle, the American porn star turned performance artist, would like a word with British authorities. OItOs outrageous: your customs people wonOt allow any of my videos into the country. WhatOs the matter with you all? When I come over and perform my live show, they make me cut out anything that shows penetrative sex. I mean, cOmon, God has programmed all of us to be interested in sexuality, itOs a gift! Britain has a lot to learn from America.O The recent British High Court decision to allow seven hardcore films to be sold in sex shops did not extend to any of SprinkleOs productions; not Deep Inside Annie Sprinkle, nor Sluts and Goddesses Video Workshop. However, one east London cinema is screening her film, Annie SprinkleOs Herstory of Porn, as part of Porno Chic, a season that sets out to explore the issue that pornography, whether we like it or not, has entered mainstream culture through TV, advertising, cinema, music and the Internet. SprinkleOs film can best be described as docu-porn, charting a 25-year career in the industry with dozens of clips from her films, accompanied by her often humorous commentary. OIn erotica you just use the feather, in porn you use the whole chicken,O she quips. Much of it is decidedly unappealing, but the latter half of the film, showcasing the work she produced herself, is compelling if only because it shows a woman enjoying sex in a way that one never usually sees in either mainstream pornography or mainstream cinema.
OThe film is really art,O she claims. OI want it to play in museums. It is not meant to be erotic.O This is fortunate since it includes everything from cheap 1970s nasties to a hotchpotch of ONew AgeO footage featuring yogic chants, lesbian mermaids and Ocry-gasmsO. OI want womenOs studiesO students, cultural theorists and film students to see it,O she adds. OItOs about making people think.O Born Ellen Steinberg, Sprinkle rebelled against her well-to-do teacher parents and became a prostitute when she left school. She drifted into the porn industry and is one of only a handful of women to have come out the other side with her own career. She calls herself a Opro-porn feministO and is evangelical about the benefits of sexually explicit material to society in general OThere should be sex kitchens in every town like they have soup kitchens, then there would be less rape, less war, less violenceO and to women in particular. OThe reason many women donOt like porn is because they are filled with shame about their own bodies, they feel itOs wrong to explore their own sexual pleasure.O Surely it has occurred to Sprinkle that there are other, more convincing reasons why many women do not enjoy pornography? Leaving aside the usual charges that it is exploitative, violent and degrading, much of it is mind-numbingly dull and repetitive, badly produced and lacking any aesthetic allure. OYes, I agree a lot of porn is bad, patriarchal and misogynistic,O Sprinkle says. OBut no matter where we stand, pornography reflects us all. ThatOs why I went into producing, directing and starring in my own films, so we could have a product by women for women for the first time.O
She made a series of films with Candida Royalle, a New York producer who got Owomen-friendlyO films on to the top shelves of video shops both in the United States and in Britain. The work was based on the premise that women wanted their pornography to be romantic. The result was a cross between a Gold Blend ad and a Madonna video (you remember, before she got squeamish about page three girls). Trying to second-guess what kind of visual material will stimulate women has so far left the soft porn industry at a loss. Several years ago a flurry of magazines was launched, including For Women and Bite. These disappeared as abruptly, for the simple reason that women didnOt buy them. Kathryn Hoyle, owner of womenOs sex shop Sh!, believes women are not confident about exploring pornography for themselves; they usually discover it through a partner and this is not necessarily a positive initiation. OHow can women know if they like pornography when itOs so difficult to get hold of material?O she asks. OEven with top-shelf magazines, buying them is embarrassing. In my local newsagentOs, I feel I have to say OOh, IOm buying these for work, you know, itOs researchO. If I feel like that, doing the job I do, so must most other women. ThereOs a feeling that if you are a woman buying porn, you must either be a frump who canOt get sex any other way, or a nymphomaniac.O
At HoyleOs London shop, there is a video machine so women can watch before they buy. OSometimes I go down to that area of the shop and there are all these women sitting on the floor watching a film, and I feel like handing round popcorn. But if we didnOt provide this service, IOm not sure women would buy; they wouldnOt feel confident about paying for a video they might not like.O Is it possible to make a general assumption about what material women enjoy? ONo. ItOs always said women prefer suggestive material rather than explicit, that they enjoy the spoken or written word rather than the visual, but I havenOt seen much evidence to support that in my shop.O
In Britain, where the laws governing the distribution of pornography are among the toughest in the democratic world, the debate about women and pornography is still in its infancy. It is not a bandwagon British feminists often choose to climb aboard. A recent example was news coverage of the imminent release in this country of Baise-Moi, the controversial French film about two women who go on a spree of sex and murder. It contains explicit sex scenes, as did last yearOs French film Romance. The only voices of protest so far have come from the National ViewersO and ListenersO Association and the Conservative Family Group. There have been no feminist protests; yes, the film is directed by a woman, but in the US that would not be enough to restrain the anti-porn camp. In the US, many feminist academics have made entire careers out of pornography. Among them is University of Michigan law professor Catherine MacKinnon whose anti- porn diatribe Only Words asserts: OPornography, in the feminist view, is a form of forced sex.O MacKinnon and fellow anti-porn campaigner Andrea Dworkin have been dubbed OMacDworkinO by hostile pro- porn feminists and have gone so far as to try to introduce a Pornography Victims Compensation Act which would give women and men the right to sue if they felt they had been injured by any form of sexual expression they found offensive. OI donOt think these anti-porn women have seen my films,O Sprinkle says. OBut loads of other women have. ThatOs why pro-porn feminists are winning the war … that says the answer to bad pornography is no pornography. ThatOs not right and more and more feminists are agreeing with that. The solution is for us to make better porn.O