New York’s Porn Industry Is Making Porn For Women
By Rachel Hodin
Having spent the former months of this year researching for an article on Brooklyn’s porn industry, I noticed a particularly progressive trend in the porn coming out of New York — and an especially divergent trend, when compared to the porn industry out in LA. In New York, many porn performers, producers and directors are determined to make porn for women.
I was never a huge porn watcher myself, and so I was shocked to discover the infrequency of female orgasms in porn. I figured that the epicenter of porn—Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley—with all of the crazy fetishes they embrace, would at least be an unprejudiced industry. But I learned that this, too, is not the case.
“Porn originated from the male gaze,” Gram Ponante, a self-described “porn expert”, told me. What’s more, he argued that porn would never have been invented if it weren’t for men’s need to demonstrate their accomplishments. And Cindy Gallop, a well-known English advertising consultant, is certainly aware of this truth.
At 53-years-old, Ms. Gallop is as horny as ever, and her man of choice is a 20-something. Yet the excitement she felt over her first cougar coitus was soon replaced by disappointment; far from an intimate, mutually enjoyable time, she found herself the recipient to peculiar, fantastical requests and the target of just downright poor manners. Was Ms. Gallop flummoxed? Certainly. Offended? Ehh, not really—but only because she had the wherewithal to know this has nothing to do with her and everything to do with the inadequacy of sex education these days. After taking another crack at her newfound cougar lifestyle, that vague disturbance she had soon gave way to full-blown concern.
During a Ted Talk, Ms. Gallop announced that her concern is indeed with “the young guy who believes because hardcore pornography has taught him,” but more so with “the young girl whose boyfriend wants to come on her face, she does not want him to come on her face, but hardcore porn has taught her that all men love coming on women’s faces, all women love having their faces come on, and therefore she must let him come on her face and she must pretend to like it.” So Ms. Gallop did what any normal, self-sufficient woman would do, and launched MakeLoveNotPorn.com. Men these days, she lamented in her Talk, think that what they see in porn is what real sex should look like. Far from an anti-porn company, this website instead intends to promote porn. The twist? She gets to choose the porn that goes up on her website, her only criteria being that no one performs for the camera. The result is more sensual porn, and definitely more female orgasms. This is porn promotion from a woman, with an emphasis on women’s pleasure.
“The issue I’m tackling is the total absence in society of an open, healthy, honest, truthful discussion around sex in the real world, which, amongst many other benefits, will enable people to bring a real-world mindset to the viewing of what is essentially artificial entertainment,” she said. And there’s another, more selfish issue she’s tackling too—the fact that she is simply not enjoying her sex with 20-something guys these days. Porn, she remarked, is entirely male-dominated, and so it’s no wonder these guys don’t know how to get a woman off—they’ve never seen it in porn. Moreover, she argued, women simply can’t compete with porn stars. And if they can’t deliver what guys see in porn, then men will not enjoy themselves either.
Part of the reason porn is so male-dominated is because the same old, white, misogynistic men who started the porn industry in LA still run the business out there. And since they’ve made so much money doing what they do, they have no intention to stop—despite the fact that everywhere around them porn and the definition of porn continues to expand in liberal, forward-thinking ways. As soon as they’ve exhausted one female performer, they’ll quickly dispose of her and replace her with new talent. But in New York, without access to unlimited performers, people in the porn industry must make do with what they have.
Without the resplendently detailed sets of Los Angeles and the thirsty performers that inhabit these sets, the porn made in New York is typically less professional and organized. Since they’re not bogged down with technicalities—camera angles, lighting, etc.—they have more room to experiment. So you’ll get people like Max Ryder, the face of Cockyboys (based in Williamsburg), who revels in exposing a more humanistic side of himself. In his “Real Talk” column on his blog, he shares everything that goes down once the camera is turned off. In one particularly notable entry, he opens up a conversation on how to maintain a healthy and private romantic relationship if you’re in porn. Or you’ll get Porno Jim, who hosts The Porno Jim Show in New York City with the sole purpose of generating more female orgasms in porn. “The only way porn can ever be worthwhile as a cultural element is for it to look more like what real sex looks like,” he told me. Or even Creamy Coconut, a Brooklyn-based filmmaker and porn producer, who considers the porn she makes to be educational. “I don’t cut out the parts where the women have orgasms and I kind of put light on techniques,” she told me.
Female orgasms really are such a crucial element to porn. Because otherwise, as Porno Jim astutely pointed out, “why would women in the world think they’re supposed to have orgasms? They don’t see it in the porn they watch. They’re not conditioned to believe that it exists.”