This year, I’m a proud sponsor of the Good For Her Feminist Porn Awards! To be exact, “better than chocolate” will be featured at the dessert buffet as we are the Diamond Hospitality Sponsor! Sweet Pleasures is our business, how good is that? 😉
The Feminist Porn Awards is hosted by my friends at Good For Her Adult Boutique and will be held on April 8th and 9th in Toronto. The official website with more detailed info about the different award categories can be found here: http://www.goodforher.com/fpa_2010.
So, why did I decide to support this event? Well, for one I am supporting the Awards because they attract some of the most dedicated boutique owners, sex educators and lovely people from all over the world and I would like to give back for the support that they extend to my young brand. But through the sponsorship I also came to realize how much there is to Feminist Porn today. When I first learned about the Awards, my first question was:
Isn’t there a contradiction between “feminism” and “porn”?
Well, after all much of today’s mainstream porn production is targeting men, and often presents unnatural, stereotypical characters. So I guess what many women tend to do is to ignore porn and simply not watch it. But I have to say, that watching porn can be quite stimulating and it is a nice way to get new ideas to shake up your sex life. We all know that the world is inundated with cheesy, cliche, degrading, no-budget, patronizing and stupid porn. But we also believe that erotic fantasy is powerful stuff, and that women deserve to put their dreams and desires on film too. That’s why a group of visionaries started the feminist porn business, following the logic of Annie Sprinkle who says: “The answer to bad porn is not no porn. It’s better porn!”. I vigorously agree with Annie.
Feminist porn is defined as “Porn which does not portray, promote, or utilize stereotypical gender constructs, exploitative gaze, or highly unnatural, stereotypical appearance standards. Also, the porn would be produced by a company dedicated to equality in all levels of production, promotion, and distribution.”. The goal of the Good For Her Feminist Porn Awards is to honor pornographers whose groundbreaking work offers a fresh perspective on the sexual expression of women and everyone who finds themselves under-represented in mainstream pornography.
The past five years have seen a multitude of improvements in the adult industry as a whole, especially as it pertains to women. Perhaps most important of these is the explosion of female filmmakers looking to change the way that sex is presented on screen. Queer directors are moving away from delicate lesbian sex to authentic representations of the diversity of queer communities and exploring the ways that sex and culture interact. Straight female directors are showing that porn for women doesn’t always have to look like romance novels come to life, but that soft-core and hardcore are equally sought after by discerning female porn viewers.
What follows this growth in female directors, is of course, female viewers. Women are watching porn, talking about porn, buying porn and sharing porn with their partners in record numbers – a reported 1/3 of porn viewers are women, and as many as 9 million women access adult websites per month.
If you would like to check it out for yourself, maybe try these movies: “All about Anna”, “Constance”, “Pink Prison”, Female Fantasies”.
Have a good time 🙂
I am looking forward to the Awards and am proud to be a part of it.
Yours,
Nomi
Nomi Tang 