I have never been a good student of history, at least not in the traditional sense. I hate reading about war, but war is only one lens through which we can study the past. History is literally just stuff that happened, and wars are not the only thing that happened. Almost any cultural phenomenon or artistic movement can serve as a historical lens, and that includes smut.
By studying the history of pornography and watching Golden Age films, one can gain a deeper understanding of how decency is weaponized by the state, and an appreciation for how smut pioneers made free speech that much freer. You can also use porn as a lens to learn about the history of organized crime, the FBI, and how mercurial the concepts of “good guy” and “bad guy” really are.
You also learn a lot about how women are treated under capitalism.
In a vacuum, no sex act is wrong, as long as that sex act is being enjoyed by enthusiastic, consenting adults. The same applies to the depiction of those sex acts on film. But porn is not made in a vacuum and, as with any job, women’s experiences working in pornography vary greatly. Sex work is valid work—and women can be exploited in any field—but the very nature of the work can make any exploitation more acutely felt. (It is worth noting that the “legitimate” movie business is hardly free from sexual exploitation and abuse.)
People aren’t quite as quick to praise a #girlboss as they were five years ago, but the idea that putting a woman in charge will lead to a more fair and equitable workplace persists, and it feels like porn made by women—if not for women—would naturally be more ethical. But women are not immune to the influences of racism, sexism, transphobia, and classism, nor can they escape the realities of capitalism. Women are more likely be aware of the specialized oppression their gender faces as a whole; they’re also more likely to be empathetic toward these instances of oppression. But there is no guarantee a woman will write, direct, or produce a more progressive piece of pornography (or any kind of art for that matter).
Still, viewing classic pornography that was “made” by a woman gives us an interesting (if horny) lens through which to view the past. One is immediately disabused of the idea that “putting a woman in charge” makes for more forward-thinking, feminist sex flicks but—in many instances—you can see the influence of the attitudes of the woman who made the movie (for better or worse). Keeping in mind that second wave feminism was not exactly sex worker-friendly—porn was one subject on which the feminists of the time and the religious right could agree—it’s not surprising that most porn of the ‘70s and early ‘80s fails to meet a progressive or feminist standard (though some of it does pass the Bechdel test).
I tend to pick my porn based on the actors (the real workers of the industry)—anything with Jamie Gillis, R. Bola, Lisa De Leeuw, Herschel Savage, Sharon Mitchell, Andrea True, or Veronica Hart usually makes it into the queue—and I’ve only recently started focusing on directors. For one, it’s kind of hard to keep track of who directed what, as with the exception of the big names—Pachard, Damiano, Lincoln, the Mitchel brothers, etc.—a lot of directors did their directing under pseudonyms. Setting out to find porn directed by women is even more challenging. I reached out to Ashley West of the Rialto Report via Twitter direct message to see if he could point me in the right direction, and he confirmed that finding early porn with a “genuine female lens” is not all that simple.
“Golden age porn had a few female directors, but very few of them brought a genuine female lens to the genre until Candida Royalle in the mid ‘80s, who made that her raison d’être,” he wrote. “Until then, the most prolific directors on the east coast were people like Roberta Findlay and, to a lesser extent, Doris Wishman. Both of them were personally uncomfortable around other women, and surrounded themselves with men, so they were hardly role models as female directors. On the west coast were people like Ann Perry, Summer Brown and Svetlana (though the latter two worked closely with their filmmaking husbands so it’s difficult to know what their individual contributions were.) And then there were the actresses, like Annette Haven or Clair Dia who occasionally made individual movies but didn’t stay long behind the camera.”
(You can’t always trust the credits, either: Sometimes, West noted, women were credited as directors even why they had nothing to do with a film’s productions. “It’s a disappointing aspect of the golden age that it took woman so long to be taken seriously as directors,” West wrote.)
Porn doesn’t have to have been made by good role models to be good porn, and these early women-led films are still worth watching. Aside from sex, there may not seem to be overlapping themes between Roberta Findlay’s more caustic work and Candida Royalle’s soft, romantic stories, yet you can clock dialogue, scenes and jokes that are unmistakably tinged with the experience of fucking as a woman in both of their work. (Or perhaps I am reading too much into it; I have been watching a lot of porn.)
It’s fun to watch people fuck on film, regardless of who wrote and directed the scenes, and the following 10 flicks are fun, or at least fun to talk about. Here they are, in no particular order: A bunch of vintage skin flicks written and/or directed by women, imperfections and all.