Feminist Porn Now

 

I started the Feminist Porn Guide site back in 2012, partly to make a home for my Periodic Table of Feminist Porn graphic and partly to celebrate the explosion of new and diverse perspectives that had come to shelter under the feminist porn umbrella.

It's now 2022 and thousands of people have used this site to find good porn that caters to their need for more ethical, more diverse and more feminist adult entertainment. The landscape has also changed a bit. The term "feminist porn" has become a little disputed in the porn world.

In 2015 the Feminist Porn Awards announced a hiatus after a successful 10 year run. The awards that year suffered from a public spat with a number of indie porn producers who felt the awards were not transparent enough and did not properly define what it meant to be "feminist". There was also a lingering misconception that the term meant only queer/lesbian porn or that it excluded some people.

The Feminist Porn Awards have since returned in 2017 relabelled as the Toronto International Porn Festival, with all the same categories. They now ask submitters to affirm that their productions followed the APAC ethical production guidelines.

"Ethical porn" has become something of a replacement term for "feminist porn", partly because of this ongoing discussion / debate about what it means for a porn film to be feminist. Performers in particular have argued that the content of the film doesn't matter, it is only whether performers are treated well on set that counts as a properly feminist, ethical porn film. Certainly the focus has increasingly narrowed to how best to create decent working conditions for sex workers in porn.

Self-identification as "feminist" has become an issue. A number of directors have disavowed the term, despite earlier winning Feminist Porn Awards for their work. I have removed those people's films / sites from this guide as they don't wish to be associated with the word.

The major adult industry association XBiz created a special category in 2014 to cater to the growth of feminist porn - the Feminist Porn Release of the Year (this went to Shine Louise Houston's Occupied). Since then, however the categories have changed a number of times, moving from "Best Alternative Site" to "Best Site - For Women" and then to "Best Site - Female Produced" in 2018. Again, this shows a move away from the phrase "feminist porn" within the industry.

In the meantime, the large tube sites have tried to jump on the feminist porn bandwagon, getting mainstream press coverage about the number of female viewers their sites have, despite the fact that they do not create any porn and often host illegally uploaded / pirated copies of independent porn.

In the last few years, feminist porn producers have been pushing the idea that it's ethical to pay for your porn rather than watch it for free on tube sites. By paying, the surfer helps to pay performers a decent wage and it assists with the creation of more independent porn.

Of course, there are plenty of porn creators who are happy to use the term feminist to describe their work and will happily engage in debates online as to what the phrase "feminist porn" actually means. It's still a very handy way to identify independent, queer- / female-produced porn that seeks to move beyond the current boundaries of porn. It's also a useful signifier of the ongoing movement within the porn industry to make porn more inclusive, diverse and ethical.

If you want to support good feminist porn, please consider joining the sites listed here (and yes, that does include my own site Bright Desire!). Your money does help to produce better porn.

By the way - this site definitely needs a revamp. If I find some time, I'll do it soon!

 

by Ms. Naughty (also known as Louise Lush), June 2022

 

Bio

Ms. Naughty is a filmmaker, author, webmistress and feminist. She was named Indie Porn Icon at the Toronto International Porn Festival in 2017. She has been making porn sites for women since 2000 and runs Bright Desire, a new wave feminist adult site featuring her own films. It won Best Website at the Feminist Porn Awards in 2015. She also jointly runs ForTheGirls.com, a large adult website for straight women. She blogs at MsNaughty.com. Her films are listed in detail at Indigo Lush.

 



Bright Desire

Feminist Porn Guide