[This is actually an essay that I had published in one of my former Yahoo! fan groups around 2004. I recently discovered it while going through my archives, and thought that it was just too good to resist reposting....especially in light of some recent whack comments by Gail Dines of late.. Feel free to use freely as Kaeopectate to Dines' verbal diarrhea.]

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(Preliminary note by Anthony: This essay by Nina Hartley was originally published as an essay for the print-based First Amendment journal The Gauntlet for their January 1993 issue; it was later republished in an slightly edited and extended form for the anthology Sex Work: Readings By Women In The Sex Industry (edited by Fredrique Delacoste and Priscilla Alexander). I have reposted it here with minimal syntax and spelling corrections, and with a few annotations to update certain information to the present time.)

REFLECTIONS OF A FEMINIST PORN STAR
by Nina Hartley

(Originally published in The Gauntlet magazine; January 1992)

My name is Nina Hartley.

When this is published, I will be 32 years old and will have spent the last nine years as an active member of the sexual entertainment community, specifically the worlds of erotic dancing and explicit video. I am also a graduate nurse (BSN, magna cum laude, San Francisco State, class of ’85), a secular Jew, a third-generation feminist, a happy bisexual, a member of a long-standing two-women-one-man triad of over ten years duration.  I do not happen to be a survivor of abuse, drug addiction or incest.  I consciously chose, as a path to self-knowledge, the exploration of sexuality in its many forms.  Having been reared to celebrate the female anatomy in all its variation, I expected my experience in adult entertainment to be a positive one.  I looked forward to a journey that would help me integrate the basic feminist credo of body acceptance into my day-to-day reality.

As someone who was raised to be distrustful of male sexuality (ivory-tower Berkeley in the ’60′s and ’70′s), I indulged my exhibitionism — an OK feeling, according to the sex books of that time – and used erotic dancing  — and, later, explicit videos — to demystify men’s sexual nature and come to terms with my own. Sex work gave me an arena in which to work though my fear of men and their sexuality, and I have not been disappointed in the path I have taken. I see the sex drive as a natural, healing and empowering force of nature (thanks to “Liberating Masturbation” and the original “Our Bodies, Ourselves”). Being able to revel in the sheer joy of sex has developed my capacity for compassion and caring; and my joy touches many others who are struggling to make sex a more comfortable part of their lives.

Over the years, I have been privy to many intimate secrets usually reserved for doctors or counselors. Hundreds of adult consumers, motivated by the permission I give them to explore their sexuality in private, write to share their experiences with me.  I’m honored by their trust. I’ve only begun to realize the power and scope of female sexuality and I can’t wait to see what the next nine years will bring!

I believe “feminist” is a self-applied label.

I am angered that a few women, granted lots of coverage by the press because of their extreme views, are being touted as the only voice of feminism. I reject the notion that there is some secret feminist orthodoxy, some single standard of measuring who is a “real” feminist. If feminism is about the promotion of equality between women and men, then I am one. If feminism is about the right of women to follow the paths of their lives with minimum outside interference, then I am one and proud of it. If feminism is about male-bashing or the fetishization of the concept of woman-as-eternal-victim, then I am not a feminist.

Here in the ’90′s, there is a necessary split among feminists around the issues of sexuality and censorship and I’m in the middle of it. I know that, to a lot of people, the term “feminist sex worker” is an oxymoron of the highest degree, an example of delusional thought of the deepest magnitude, or a cynical manipulation of public opinion for personal gain. I can honestly say that, for me, this is not the case. How can I be both? I’m unusual, I admit; the product of a unique life experience. But, that life gives me a different perspective on the issue of sex and feminism. I concede that I may appear to be a bunch of contradictory attitudes and behavior regarding sex and life, but my unique position lets this feminist speak from direct experience.

For a while in the early ’80s, I thought that my girlfriend, Bobby, and I were the only sexually sane women around. But I’ve found in the sex-positive feminist community — which is far larger than anyone imagines — a wide array of equally maverick, avant-garde women who have all come to remarkably similar conclusions concerning sexuality and the most recent push to “protect” women from its perceived dangers.

Before I continue, I feel that I should define the terms I’ll be using. When I use the terms “pornography”, “porno”, “porn”, or “porno movies”, I mean “words or pictures designed to arouse or titillate the viewer”. That’s all I mean.  It’s about sex and many of us don’t have a problem with that fundamental fact. I resent mightly that sex-negative feminists (or “sex-negs”, mouthing Dwokinite orthodoxy — the Dwonkinite deformation of feminism) have caused the previously neutral term “pornography” to become, in many people’s minds, synonymous with violence, degradation, death, subjugation, and harm to women.  the sex-negs have taken the root words porne (meaning “street prostitution”) and graphein (meaning “to write”) — which should merely mean “writing about street prostitution”, and say that it means “writing about female sexual slavery”.

“Pornography” is not a Greek word, but a neologism (meaning a new word from the Greek).  First usage was in France (c. 1770), in the title of a essay/research article on prostitution by the writer de la Bretonne.

Sex as a commercial venture doesn’t bother me because I do not automatically view all women as victims of sex; nor do I view all men automatically to be victimizers, or all intercourse as de facto rape (a Dworkin/MacKinnon tenet). Under capitalism, all things can be commodified; why should sex be any different? It may not be the best way to deal with sex, but it shouldn’t shock us that it occurs. The much ballyhooed “offense” of objectification is not intrinistically bad. Humans are first and foremost visual creatures.  What really matters is time, place, degree, mutuality and consent. I believe that a woman is capable of consent. If we aren’t granted that one prerogative then we are not being granted full adult status. Either women are capable of managing their sexual lives or they are not. Many of my opponents hold a bleaker view of sexual matters and this forever separates us.  My essential take on life and the sex-negs’ take on life, and our respective places in it are diametrically opposed and fundamentally at odds with one another.

For me, one of the biggest holes in the sex-negs’ argument is that they assume sexuality is essentially part of the male domain.  In their acceptance of the patriarchy’s dominion over, and definition of, sexuality, they have lost sight of the fact that there is strong theoretical evidence that in prehistoric times sexuality was the the domain of the female.  Though it may seem paradoxical that it was not used as a weapon over men in those times, sex as a weapon or a tool of terror and aggression were both invented by the ascending patriarchy as a means of social control.

Sex-neg anti-porners say that “porn is the theory; rape is the practice.”  For me, it rings truer to say “patriarchal sexual repression is the theory, rape by men and denial of sexual pleasure (to self and others) by women is the practice.” These anti-sex zealots believe they are correct in what they see, even though all they can see is what the patriarchy says is the truth about Eros.  They refuse to listen to women’s voices that say that there is anything else.

Is their truth all there really is to Eros? One can draw an anology between Newtonian and Einsteiniun physics.  For the “antis”, the idea that “porn is the theory” is an apple on the tree, and the concept that “rape is the practice” becomes as inevitable as the gravitational pull of an apple toward the earth.  As Einstein studied relativity, he found that Newtonian physics did not always apply when the intervening variable of a time dimension was applied to phonomena.  Just as Einstein “felt” there was something relative to observing the material world and set forth a mathematical formulation to better understand his instincts, I too “feel” that, in prehistorical/pre-written history, women held dominion over Eros, and sexuality existed in forms that we would not recognize today nor we would hardly comprehend.   I feel that [Andrea] Dwokin/[Catharine] MacKinnon have blinders on when they make blanket pronouncements on sex and pornography.

What galls me is that the way sex-negs express their rage impinges directly on my life and I feel I must resist this attack on my freedom of choice as assiduousy as I would resist Operation Rescue’s attack on women’s reproductive choices.  It’s all part of the same continuum of sexual choice. Either women are capable of managing their sexual lives in their entireity or they are not. It can’t be both ways.  In the end, I feel it comes down to whether or not one feels that [sexual] arousal and titillation are EVER desirable states to promote or achieve; and I believe that they are.

As someone who is aware of the complex nature of male/female sexuality in this culture, I resent it when those arguing against certain forms of sexual free expression do not begin by being dear about their sexual biases. So, in the spirit of honest disdosure, here are some of my most basic beliefs about porn imagery:

I do not feel that the mere depiction of naked women is inherently degrading. Nor do I feel that depictions of women desiring sex is a negative thing. If one has been keeping up with the literature of the past 20 years on female sexuality, one would know that many women desire frequency as well as a wide variety of sexual experiences.  I believe that  women can, and do, use the pornographic medium to lay claim to their sexuality and we need to support them in their efforts. I believe that, for people not predisposed to sociopathic fixations, no amount of exposure to “harmful” imagery will goad them to violent behavior. One should keep in mind just how many people have used passages from the Bible as justification for rape and murder. Blaming all of the sexual violence in our culture on the availability of sexually explicit words or images (no matter how distasteful) is illogical, irrational, ahistorical, puritanical, prudish, ignorant and just plain mean-spirited, no matter how well-intentioned the purveyors of such attitudes may be. It is to the culture’s disadvantage that I hear no discussion of women as perpetrators of sexual violence nor acknowledgment of men’s very real sexual pain and exploitation. We must deal with the real and women’s sexual pain and rage as only part of a bigger picture.

To overlook the root causes of institutionalized violence (5000 years of anti-pleasure, hierarchical, patriarchal social engineering) in favor of placing the blame for Western society’s ills on an entertainment form widely available for less than 100 years exposes an extreme bias. Women alone are not the victims of the system. Rather, women, children and the majority of men are oppressed by our pleasure-negative, puritanical society which deliberately denies both genders full access to their own bodies.

I never see the sexnegs publically attack the widespread availability of the primary source of our culture’s anti-female laws and attitudes — the Bible.  What the Dworkinites don’t appear to take into account is that hardcore has been legal in this country for only a generation. Porn entered the mass media (albeit much of the time in an underground form) less than 150 years ago; before that time it was the exclusive domain of the aristocracy. Since we know that the social phenomena of rape and the sexual abuse of women has been with us for far longer, it would appear that our current problems have a more complex etiology than the sex-negs care to admit.

As an educated, middle-class white female, I’m aware that I have had options in my life that are not available to all women, including many women in branches of the various sexual goods and services industries. I’ve always been the first to say that the concept of “choice” depends a lot on one’s class background, and many if not most sex workers (as with workers in all fields) might desire to make their living in other ways if there were real options available. If the sex-negs were truly coming from a standpoint of sisterly support for all women, they would strive to remove the stigma from sex work and make it easier for those who wish to leave a sex-related job to do just that. They would not treat sex workers with thinly-veiled contempt, or puritanical judgment. They would get the government to support national health insurance and a national day-care system and work to increase adult literacy and job-training programs.  Additionally, they would have to accept, like it or not, that there are a lot of sex workers of all classes who love their chosen profession.

When the sex-negs go on and on about the “horrors” of sex work, I cannot help but hear a dear chord of class bias (flavored liberally with a projection of their own worst fears). I speak from experience. I had to confront my own, unconscious, classist attitudes when I first started stripping in San Francisco in ’83.   Women were using the job for various reasons, even ones I didn’t approve of.  (Arrogant, ehh??)  For the first time in my life, I was around women who smoked, drank, partied, did drugs, picked partners who were wrong for them, wore “the wrong” clothes and no seat belts, and did other things I didn’t even know I had value judgments about until I was confronted with them. After working at the strip club for a few months, it became clear that these women had a lot more on the ball than I did when it came to sheer survival ski1ls.  It really opened my eyes to my own prejudice. Just as I demand the right to be let alone to pursue my personal goals, I had to learn to let go of my judgments toward other women. All I can do — all any feminist can do for her sisters is to take care of our business and be there for any woman who seeks our help.

I view the sex-negative feminist establishment as sitting on their high horses, propelled firmly by their personal demons, making seeping proclamations about the “reality” of the lives of sex industry workers; and I see that they no more speak for al sex workers than the Pope speaks for all Christians. These women appear to take their personal experiences with men and sex, combine them with the often true stories of women who have come forward as victims of the sex industry or abusive men, and made blanket statements about us all.  Well, ladies, just stop it.  It is unbecoming of women of your intelligence to let your personal traumas color your analysis of porn and sex work so completely.

At the National Organization for Women (NOW) national convention in Manhattan in June of ’91, Phyllis Frank, the co-chair of the New York State and National Task Forces on Pornography, told us she had come to her condusions about the “dangers” of pornography and sex work by talking only to those women who were self-identified victims/survivors of domestic or sexual abuse.   She professed amazement that she was talking to a contingent, over 12 women strong, of sex-positive feminist sex workers. Ms. Frank revealed she had formed most of her opinions about sex work by talking to women in battered women’s shelters and to women who felt they had been harmed by their involvement in sex work. She had never spoken with any woman who had positive things to say about sex work, and hadn’t thought such women existed. Moreover, she had never considered the possibility that “happy hookers” COULD exist. Of course, with the media bias against positive stories about sex work, it is easy to see how she came to such erroneous conclusions.

In talking to reactionary feminists, it becomes clear that they view me, and others of my ilk, as brainwashed, deluded, woefully misled or out-and-out lying about our experiences. (In fact, Catharine MacKinnon has referred to sex-positive feminist workers and their supporters as “house niggers who have sided with the masters”. [Quote excerpted from Playboy Forum, August 1992].) Their blatant lack of respect for the voices and experiences of other women would be laughable if it were not so insulting. It is a betrayal of all the feminist principles I learned from my mother.

These women’s refusal to consider that different women have different sexual realities, even when confronted with it in person, smacks of both arrogance and fear. It brings to mind the reaction of the [c]hurch followers when presented with evidence that the sun did not revolve around the earth. (The [Catholic] Church took over 300 years to pardon Galileo.  Will it take that long for our two sides to reconcile?)  How dare these women tell me, to my face no less, that my experience was not my experience and, furthermore, could not ever be my experience? The whole situation is Kafkaesque in the extreme. Here I am….a feminist, who, since the age of 13, has followed the early ’70′s dictum to “reclaim” and “define” my sexuality for myself….and now, nearly 20 years later, they tell me I got it all wrong. These so-called “pillars” of the feminist establishment are no better than any patriarch dismissing the testimony of a woman because she is by nature intellectually inferior to a man.

In their frenzy to see the subjugation and victimization of women in every sexual encounter, to profess that no woman’s “yes” can ever mean just that, the modern pro-censorship feminist seeks nothing less than the complete reinfantilization of every woman. In their self-righteous indignation over the status of women (which, in the West, is better now than at any time in recorded history), their own sexual self-loathing becomes glaringly obvious to objective observers. These prudes are nothing less than lap dogs of the right wing, which has calculatingly employed them as willing pawns who blindly act, in a stunning example of mutual exploitation, as tools for repression in the religious fundamentalists’ anti-liberation plan.  I guess a tendency for totalitarianism can overcome any other differences they may have.

The sex-negs’ rhetoric of “man-as-lustful-animal” vs. “woman-as-pure-victim” is Victorian sexual propaganda dressed up in modern language. It plays right into the hands of reactionary-thinking  religious fundamentalists. Can’t these women see that nothing good can come from an al1iance with a group of people who have, as their stated goal, nothing less than the recriminalization of abortion (to say nothing about their stance on gay rights)? Can’t they see that they are using (and being used by) a group that has as little respect for them as they, in turn, have for me and my comrades? It’s like watching Jews kissing the feet of the Nazis. It should give one pause.

I’m not saying that the sex industry, under the patriarchy and capitalism, doesn’t have a lot wrong with it (mostly stupidity and mindlessness). All media are affected by the dominant culture’s standards. But porn is a medium where, over time, the players have changed some of the rules and it will get better as we raise the consciousness of women, both as performers and consumers of adult material. When analyzing the explicit medium, keep in mind that it has been legal for only a little over 20 years and that women have been involved in its production (behind the camera) for less than 10 of those years. Women, as producers of porn, have yet to reach critical mass within the industry. As with 98% of all business in the U.S., it is still dominated by men (good ones and bad ones). And we women have only begun to make our voices heard and our visions seen. Now is not the time for feminists to add to efforts to stifle our voices. Drive us underground and we have lost any chance at bettering working conditions for women and men in this arena and are condemned to greater exploitation and fewer rights. Bring porn and sex work into the light of day. Promote worker control of the means of production. Legitimize its existence. Acknowledge and encourage its potential as a social and sexual tool. Enforce existing laws on kidnapping, assault, battery and rape more assiduously. See the women who are sex workers as individual people, not some stereotype.

As many working women can attest, it is difficult to have honest, sisterly dialogue with the more rabid of the anti-porn crowd due to their extreme prejudice. This behavior is a slap in the face of essential feminist process as I understand it. In trying to discuss my truths with the “MacDworkinites” (2), I feel like Alice pleading her case to the Red Queen. No logic I can use, no evidence I can gather seems to penetrate the intellectual closed-mindedness I confront. Honestly, it blows my mind to deal with some of these women. In my world of liberal security as the red-diapered youngest child of radlib parents, the idea that I might one day experience a-priori prejudice from people I was raised to feel were sisters-in-arms never entered my mind.

When I entered this field of endeavor nine years ago, it was not only to explore my sexuality; I wanted to be an aware feminist voice from inside the business. I made myself available to anyone who wanted to talk about what I did and what it meant. I’ve done countless TV and print interviews, written numerous articles (both sexy and serious), and spoken to many college classes. I’ve faced a variety of people, some sympathetic, some not so happy at my existence. I’ve looked into the eyes of women who look back at me with hatred, and I was able to understand how women could be burned as witches.  I’m usually fairly calm during these exchanges, since I am at ease with my subject and because my experiences with sex are some of my most cherished moments —  not the source of my deepest pain.

The common thread I see connecting my most vocal feminist opponents with each other is that they are operating from a base of often justified rage. This is fine. Angry women can and have affected needed change. However, they must understand just how much time and energy is expended wastefully when one is continually angry and outraged. They must learn to practice self-awareness and acknowledge when their anger is justified and when it is self-indulgent, when it is a positive force for growth and change and when it is overpowering one’s ability to think clearly. If they are honest, the distinction will be self-evident.

Speaking as someone who has made peace with my sexuality and that of men in general, it boils down to this: how does one choose to deal with one’s rage and what triggers it? I choose to feel it, acknowledge it, recognize its origins, own it and then incorporate it into my ever-evolving sense of Self. I choose to process my anger and go on with my life since I don’t want to waste the only life I have by having anger color everything, every day.

What can feminists do?  As members of the third wave of the revolution begun 30 years ago, we need to continue our struggles, in both the public and private spheres, toward equality.  What lies between now and utopia is day-to-day living. We need to do our best to demonstrate compassion toward those in pain — and to recognize when we need to mind our own god-damned business. I suggest we use feminist sex workers and feminist porn as a fifth column and use the erotic medium to change men’s and women’s attitudes at their deepest neurobiological level. We cannot-we must not-be drawn into limiting by law what consenting adults do in private. Don’t worry about how other people enjoy themselves. Instead, turn some energy to providing support to those who ask for it. Take care of your own compost heap before feeling free to meddle in others’. Learn to relax a little; we’re not going to change the problems of the world in our brief lifetimes. Pet a cat. Meditate. Work in our gardens. Take a walk. Get a massage. Give ourselves more orgasms and appreciate how far we’ve come in only thirty years.

Let us see past our antagonisms, and create some common ground so that we may build a solid future for generations of feminists to build upon.

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