The Andro-Aperture Project - my gut reaction
You know, I WANT to be wholeheartedly in favor of Kitty Stryker’s Andro-Aperture Project. I think she’s a way cool chick & has a great eye for creating hot smut. I agree with the principles that the world could use more imagery of the sort she is looking for, and that it’d be swell to encourage more men to be performers and more women to be makers of porn.
Where she loses me is with all the talk of how “female” gazes are this that and the other, and soooo different from “male” gazes.
From a purely philosophical perspective I don’t see how this can be anything other than gender essentialist bullshit. The whole idea of a “female gaze” in porn equates the shape of your genitals with BOTH your gender AND your porn viewing preferences. And if making such an equation in any other area would be challenged as BS (and most likely by people like Kitty!) then why on earth should I accept it just because it comes from the ‘feminist’ camp?
My instinctive dislike of projects like this isn’t based solely on this philosophical objection however. I have a more personal stake in it. Namely, that I am a WOMAN, with a factory-standard female pussy, who has been enjoying and even ~BUYING~ porn for herself for two and a half decades.*
To a person like me, projects like this send the message that I must not be TRULY ‘female’; that I don’t qualify as a really real woman since my “gaze” isn’t like all the other female’s gazes. That, moreover, I’m a bad girl since I’m not actively offended by the nature of existing porn or the (alleged) lack of a certain sort of imagery.
So yeah, my gut reaction is, shall we say, negative.
That said…after having been on the business end of these things for a while I can now recognize that what is really going on here is not about the content of the images at all. If it were, then all these women who are (allegedly) longing for hot pictures of beautiful men would be out there consuming scads of gay porn, or coaching the thousands of guys who send unsolicited dick pics in how to take better ones. (Talk about porn intended for women!) No, what this is about is MARKETING: framing the produced images in such a way as to seduce buyers who have been told their entire lives that they couldn’t possibly like/buy porn, for one reason or another.
This is an issue that has been much on my mind recently. You see, the porn I make would qualify as feminist porn by almost any standard.** For various reasons I’ve avoided marketing my smut as “feminist” or “ethical” porn. And this is a decision I am currently reconsidering.
So anyway. It may be true that there’s an under-served market for a certain sort of porn. Insisting that’s it’s a “female” thing is a whole ‘nother story, and one that I find deeply problematic. Which totally doesn’t mean I would try and shut it down, or that I wouldn’t shoot for the Ando-Aperture project if I got the chance.
p.s. I voted “Other” in the survey, and noted that I like tall, gangly and decidedly not masculine guys. ;p
* Hell, I buy more porn than my husband does!
** Any standard that doesn’t require a knee-jerk condemnation of forced femme play. Bitchy Jones would still hate my smut. :p
