I Saw Enthusiastic Consent
When I learned about enthusiastic consent, it also occurred to me that I’d never seen enthusiastic consent in mainstream porn. In mainstream porn, there’s very little focus on how the sex starts. It just ... starts. Feminist porn, on the other hand, tends to show what enthusiastic consent looks like in real life.
There are many ways to communicated consent, and sometimes, being verbal is important. The actors in the feminist porn I was watching didn't have conversations about consent, but they did model what non-verbal enthusiastic consent looks like. They made eye contact with each other, a lot, and used facial expressions to convey their feelings and their desire. And they spent time making non-sexual physical contact before moving on to sexual physical contact.
Read: Yes! Why Consent Is Totally Sexy
It Felt Real
Most importantly, none of the feminist porn I watched felt fake. I believed that these actors wanted to be involved in the sexual encounters they were setting up. By the time the sex started, I understood how the characters got there and I believed that every single one of them wanted to be having sex.
And the sex itself was so real. It looked like someone just set up a video camera in a place where people happened to be having sex. And to me, it looked like the actors were making all the decisions about how they were having sex. Little things they did indicated this. In the middle of a scene, one of the actors would just reach out to another and initiate a kiss, not because they were told it would make the scene better, just because they wanted a kiss. Or one of the actors would literally ask their partner to change what they were doing, move a hand, move their own body, or start pleasuring themselves. All the transitions between positions were shown, and actors communicated with each other constantly, trying new things and adjusting to increase each others' pleasure - just like in real sex!
There's a Focus on Women
The women in these films weren't there just there to pleasure their male co-stars. They had an active say in which positions they tried with their partners and which sex acts they performed. They decided when to change positions, when to move on to a new sex act, and when to let their partners guide the encounter. And, most importantly, they had orgasms - sometimes multiple orgasms - throughout the film.
While mainstream porn tends to be all about the money shot, female pleasure is the focus of feminist porn. These women controlled and facilitated the circumstances that gave them the pleasure they were seeking; they demanded that pleasure from their partners, and they received the pleasure they demanded.
All of the actors in these films were having real, enjoyable sex. They were making their own decisions about how to have sex and they were communicating with their partners about how to have better sex. This was authentic, healthy, mind-blowing sex - and I was lucky enough to get to watch.
I’d never been so turned on watching something on a screen.
Feminist Porn Makes You Think
I never realized how important it is to see authentic, consent-driven porn that's focused on female pleasure until I actually, well, saw it for myself. When mainstream porn ignores consent, they're saying that consent isn't necessary. When mainstream porn ignores women's pleasure, they're saying that female pleasure is an afterthought to male pleasure. When mainstream porn shows staged, fake, caricatures of sex, it's giving people unrealistic expectations of what sex should be. When mainstream porn represents women without agency and autonomy, it's telling women that they should defer their agency and autonomy to men in order to please them.
Feminist porn counteracts all these messages, which is exactly what we need in order to start to heal our society's fucked up relationship to sex.
I spent years thinking that porn just wasn’t for me because I wasn’t finding any porn that represented what I wanted to see. Now that I’ve discovered the wonderful world of ethically made, feminist porn, I’m finally understanding that not all porn is the same. In fact, some is radically different in all the right ways.
