Why Lesbian Porn Is the Best

This is an outtake from the 2010 Sex Blogger Calendar.

Photo Credit: Rachel Kramer Bussel, Circe

Porn. It exists in two polar fields: enticement and disgust. The enticement comes from the natural biological response that comes from watching sex; the disgust comes from the mores surrounding the porn industry. This leaves feminists, men and women alike, in a strange place.

Regular old straight porn features large breasts, close-ups on every crevice of the groin area, ejaculation shots, men with abnormally large phallus' and often, the portrayal of a woman being “talked” into having sex and then, miraculously, enjoying it. Porn generally falls in that latter category of disgust, or at least, it did for me when I watched some “research” porn for this story.

The epitome of straight porn is Bang Bros, a production company founded in 2000 that has 18 active porn sites and uses a “gonzo” filming style.  It’s unclear if this “gonzo” style is real or not; Bang Bros Corp did not return my e-mails or phone calls to answer that question. Since Bang Bros don’t appear to be facing criminal investigation, it’s likely acted out, like “reality” TV.

One video I watched opens with a van and two men: one behind the camera, the other driving. They start talking to a young man and woman who are on their way to lunch. The cameraman asks a woman wearing a short mini skirt and a tight top if she usually dresses like “that” for work. She responds no, she was just picking up her paycheck. They ask her if she knows why they are filming her and she doesn't know. They look at the young guy, who looks a bit sheepish and says, “He didn't tell you?” The men laugh, and the woman looks confused.

At this point, nausea washes over me. The three actors finally get her in the van. It takes what felt like 30 minutes of laughter and awkwardness for the two men who approached the woman with the camera to finally tell her that they are a porn company and want to film her having sex with the man. Finally, they coax her into it. I almost had to turn it off because it made me so uncomfortable.

The video is a typical mainstream porno portraying the man and woman in the back of the van. I could say they had intercourse, but that doesn't quite feel right. She “gets it.” It's nauseating.

The lead-up is too much of a joke on her, and though she seems to enjoy what happens in the back of the van, it's still a typical example of the male-dominated pornography industry: Male fantasies crafted and executed by men with not much of women’s fantasies or pleasure in mind. Though the whole episode made me ill, there are obviously some people who do get turned on by what I found repulsive and violating.

There may be women who enjoy watching this sort of portrayal, but there is also a need for more feminist-based porn. And here, in this land of women sitting pretty submitting to the desire of a male filmmaker, a new kind of pornography is emerging.

Juicy Pink Box, a lesbian porn company run by Jincey Lumpkin, is one such alternative to emerge from the rejection of straight porn that involves cheesy music and a whole lot of butt shots.

Lumpkin says she first encountered porn when she found her father's secret stash between the drawers in their recreation room during middle school. Growing up in Carrollton, Ga., with a population of 23,000 in the foothills of the Appalachian mountains, Lumpkin never knew what a lesbian was until she watched The Howard Stern Show. Ten years later, Lumpkin says she was looking for lesbian porn, but most of what she found she didn’t like.

“In traditional girl-on-girl porn created for a male audience, there is a huge focus on the actual body parts … You see a lot of them. The girls spread each other's ass cheeks wide apart so that the camera can see every little crevice, which is overkill,” says Lumpkin, who eventually quit her job as a lawyer to make her own porn. “The fake screaming, the body modification-all of it ... it's manufactured to satisfy a craving in a mostly male customer-base who has been fed a constant diet of the same thing for years now.”