New York Times Profiles New Wave Of Women Auteurs In DIY Porn

“Women are leading the new guard” in creating porn — independently made porn that allows women creators greater control over both the content of their product, but of the production as well, according to an in-depth story by writer Amanda Hess published by The New York Times this weekend. Read the entire New York Times story by visiting this link. “The porn industry ... is looking less and less like an industry these days,” Hess wrote in the piece. "Amateurs are flooding the internet; piracy has addled the once-dominant studios; production has atomized and scattered. But along the way, something interesting has started to happen: Women are rising up.” Hess shines the always-bright New York Times spotlight on several independent porn performers and creators who, Hess says, “now run their own shows.... (making) way for a wider range of sexual and gender representations." Hess first profiles Kelly Shibari, a native of Japan and “plus size” adult model who was working as a Hollywood set designer in 2007 when a writer’s strike put her, and thousands of other behind-the-scenes Hollywood tradespeople out of work. That’s when she first got the idea that porn could be a source of income. “My first reaction was, ‘There’s no fat girls in porn,’” Ms. Shibari said. And there were definitely no fat Asian girls. “The stereotype of Asians in porn is that they’re long and lean and not very curvy. That’s how white Americans see Asian sexuality.” Her response — go into business for herself, producing and starring in her own films that depicted her in sex scenes of her choosing, as opposed to “fetish scenes that emphasized her weight.” By 2016, she was featured as the first “plus size” nude model in the pages of Penthouse Magazine. Hess also interviewed Lotus Lain, an African-American performer who recently vowed to retire from boy-girl sex scenes due to her repeated casting in racialized fetish videos.  “There are all kinds of kinks in the world,” Lain told The Times. “I don’t understand why our industry chooses to play into the racist ones.” Lain now serves as a spokesperson for the Free Speech Coalition, with her priority being, she says, “to amplify performers’ voices that are outside the mainstream or in more vulnerable communities.” Leigh Raven, who earlier this year made headlines both within the porn community and outside it allegations of sexual misconduct and abuse on porn sets, told Hess that the trend toward independently produced porn is encuraging because, “the more power we can put in the hands of performers, the better. Let the people who actually have to experience it be in control.” Academic Constance Penley in 2013 co-edited a collection of writing entitled The Feminist Porn Book, but now says that in the few years since she has been encouraged by what she sees as the blurring lines between the mainstream porn industry and the feminist uprising. “I’m impressed how these efforts cross much of the industry, from Stoya to Stormy Daniels, from the cammers to the sex toy companies,” Penley said. Other performers profiled in Hess’s New York Times piece include AVN Hall of Famer Nina Hartley, trans porn pioneer Jiz Lee, and dircetor Shine Louise Houston. Photos of Leigh Raven (l) by Baldwin Saintilus, Kelly Shibari (r) Michael Dorausch / Wikimedia Commons