Feminist Porn Awards
Feminist Porn Awards
Originally uploaded by Thomas Roche My new column at Blowfish considers whether it makes sense for the Feminist Porn Awards to have completely dispensed with categories this year (read the whole thing here!) -- an excerpt:
That's right, there's no categories at all! Just a big fat wad of porn, all mingling together in a puppy-pile. I’m utterly floored - blown away. I don’t know what to think. Enriched or outraged? Both, and neither. I have no fucking idea. It’s a dangerous choice that’s got me genuinely confused about where I stand, something that rarely happens in porn.
Clearly one of the things that makes “feminist porn” important is that it breaks down existing categories - between gay and straight, male and female, trans and cisgender, et cetera. But no categories at all? Chemistry 4 right up there “competing” against Doing It Ourselves: The Trans Women Porn Project? I’ll confess that has me simultaneously invigorated and freaked out.
I’ve had this conversation in relation to the Oscars, where, for instance, documentaries don’t win Best Picture even though they theoretically could. The market is dominated by “fiction” films. If documentaries didn’t have their own categories at the Oscars, they would never win anything. The documentary categories guarantee that productions in that category receive fair consideration against others of their same type, rather than having to compete against profoundly different films that are guaranteed to always get more attention.
Similarly, with the Feminist Porn Awards while I am fascinated by the decision not to slice and dice feminist porn productions into categories, I have to ask whether it makes sense to compare, for instance, feminist trans porn to feminist dyke porn to feminist straight porn. Can you really draw conclusions about what’s hot based on no criteria other than it being hot?
Read the rest here.