Image: Coco La Creme Credit: Elizabeth Hames
Playing host to the Feminist Porn Awards last Friday, Elvira Kurt opened the event by acknowledging its founder: “The Awards was started seven years ago by one woman who had one purpose in mind: how to drive more business to her store.”
The store is Good for Her, a sex-positive shop in the Annex, and the woman is Carlyle Jensen.
Kurt’s comment was in jest, as Jensen launched the awards for altruistic reasons, but it is true that the event has tapped into a world of potential consumers that has been largely ignored by the industry.
Adult store shelves are stocked with content that appeals to the male sexual appetite, and few producers make porn with women in mind. What little content major studios do make for women is labeled as “couple’s porn” so as not to alienate their male audiences.
In the past few years, we’ve seen the rise of feminist porn. It’s all about depicting the genuine sexuality of women and marginalized people. You won’t find fake orgasms or forced ooh babys in feminist films. The pleasure must be authentic.
This year’s winner for Hottest Dyke Film, Hella Brown: Real Sex in the City, is a good example of that. It features a cast of queer women of colour having very real sex in the city. When a 30-second clip of the film was shown at the gala, the crowd went nuts. And they screamed even louder when the camera trained on female ejaculate dribbling down one performer’s thigh.
Compare this to the majority of mainstream adult content, where porn star’s breasts grow ever larger to fit into a typical male fantasy, where the “cum shot” — male ejaculation onto his partner’s face — is a standard trope, where even lesbian scenes are geared toward the straight male pallet.
And why would producers make anything different? Men’s sexual drive has made millionaires out of Hustler’s Larry Flynt and Playboy’s Hugh Hefner, and it has helped make adult entertainment into the extremely profitable industry it is today.
“Clearly with it being a $13 billion industry, they didn’t care about the female market that much. They were making their money regardless,” said Lorraine Hewitt of Good For Her.
But times change.
With so much adult content available for free online, pornographers are rapidly losing their paying customers.
“In the past two years (free Internet porn) has really hit everyone’s bottom line — badly,” said Kim Kysar, brand manager for porn studio Pink Visual, at the 2011 Adult Entertainment Expo.
Porn consumers have “just felt screwed over for so many years. And they know that a DVD that costs $2.50 to make — at max — is being sold for 50, 60 dollars,” she said.
“So they figure they’re stickin’ it to us and they’re entitled to it.”
Meanwhile, the number of women looking to buy porn is increasing — and they’re willing to pay for it.
When it comes to female consumers, quality is an issue, said Hewitt. Websites like Art of the Blowjob and Pornographic Love tout their artistic photography. And a lot of work goes into editing a film that is aesthetically pleasing and arousing.
“Generally, (women) will be willing to pay for and support people who are being thoughtful towards their wants and desires,” said Hewitt.
It’s a consumer base that’s notorious for opening up their wallets for products that make them feel good. Just look at the turnout for Oprah’s Life Class in Toronto last week. The lineup was hundreds of fans long, many of whom lined up at four in the morning to take a lesson from the self-made icon.
In other industries, women have demonstrated their immense buying power. According to sheconomy.com an estimated 85 per cent of all purchases are made by women. Online, women make up the majority of shoppers, with 22 per cent looking for deals online at least once a day.
So is the women’s market a missed opportunity?
That’s certainly what it looked like at the Feminist Porn Awards gala last Friday.
The event had one of its largest turnouts yet this year. The ground floor was packed with VIPS and fans dressed to the nines and the balcony held standing room only.
“I’ve been talking to people from all over the world who are here for this event,” said N. Mawell Lander, whose Emile won an award for sexiest short.
Even mainstream studio Vivid Entertainment got a piece of the action. Tristan Taormino’s film The Expert Guide to Advanced Anal Sex, which won her the Smutty School Teacher Award, was produced under the Vivid label.
Whether or not Jensen intended to drive more business to her store, it certainly hasn’t been bad for the pocketbook.
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Next week’s Business of X-Rated: Why a porn star makes a great female role model.
Elizabeth Hames is on Twitter. Follow her @elizabethhames
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