Editorial

In popular parlance and way too much academic criticism, porn performance is understood as little more than taking off one’s clothes and doing what comes naturally – that there is no skill to be observed in any individual performer. This idea – that the porn star is no more than an interchangeable assemblage of holes for penetration – is properly laid to bed in the analysis of Sasha Grey which opens this issue. In ‘Grey, Gonzo and the Grotesque: The Legacy of Porn Star Sasha Grey’, Rebecca Saunders explores Grey’s adventuring at the outer limits of the physical and the psychological possibilities of porn performance, locating the performer within a tradition where porn-making is conceived as a potentially intelligent and creative process – perhaps even an ‘alternative gonzo’ where ‘many of the dominant features of gonzo [are rendered] into expressions of her particular artistic vision’. In an article that moves across Grey’s early performances to her appearances in mainstream ‘respectable’ film and television, Saunders offers a new account of the star and how she has become ‘an enduringly potent figure of female sexual empowerment in porn’.

Censorship remains a constant object of investigation for porn studies, and Victoria Ruetalo’s ‘¡Prohibida! Armando Bó and Isabel Sarli’s Struggle with Censorship in Argentina’ develops an interesting reconstruction of State devices in post-1955 Argentina. Ruetalo takes the work of the sexploitation couple Armando Bó and Isabel Sarli as her focus, exploring the historical and political contexts which saw the introduction of increasing interdictions against cultural objects focused on sexuality. Her analysis explores the hypocrisies that often underpin acts of censorship but she also focuses on the kinds of violence that censorship enacts on, particularly, female bodies. Yet Ruetalo’s analysis goes further than simply noting the viciousness of the censors, making an argument for understanding these processes as complex, ideological, sometimes even paradoxical and that the reconstruction of their histories poses significant challenges for film historians and critics. Exploring the journey of one film, Intimacies of a Prostitute, Ruetalo also suggests that censorship plays a complex role in the artistic process; that while Film Studies might understand the intrinsic artistic value of a film through attributions of authorial intent and creativity, this picture is complicated in this case by the many hands involved in altering the final version. Ruetalo’s article is a fascinating slice of history but it also makes a significant contribution to our understandings of the relationships between the cinematic body and the State.

The normative constraints of gender and social differences, and the institutional chains of marital, monogamous, reproductive sex which so often underpin impulses to censor are the subject matter of the ‘Victorian Pornographer Edward Sellon’s The Ups and Downs of Life’. Scholarship on Victorian pornography is relatively scarce, and Edward Sellon's work has occupied a fairly marginal position within that scholarship, but Stefania Arcara turns a spotlight on the ways this porno/autobiographer’s anti-establishment and nonconformist view of society, centred around the idea of instinctual sex as a liberating, ‘natural’ force, is a starting point for a radical critique of civilization and morality. The article examines Sellon’s posthumously published autobiography and the form its self-narration takes, mixing factual and historical information while presenting himself as a hero in the literary tradition of the English novel. Ancara argues that ‘Sellon’s peculiarity as a pornographer consists of his skilful appropriation of the conventions of Victorian autobiography, a narrative mode aimed at the production of white, male, bourgeois subjectivity’. That subjectivity is complicated by Sellon’s contamination of it with the indecent reciting of numerous sexual encounters, but perhaps this also tells us something about the English propensity for ‘bawdiness’ which, notwithstanding the stereotype of English reserve, seems constantly to resurface in any discussion of British porn.

In ‘Original Climax Films: Historicizing the British Hardcore Pornography Film Business’, Oliver Carter is not so much interested in the content of British pornographies but in how the business emerged in the 1960s. His article suggests that the business operated as an alternative economy of cultural production. This much-needed research explores some of the similarities and differences with the history of pornography in the United States to understand how different forms of sexual commerce co-exist and can influence each other. The specifics of national pornographies are surely as important as national cinemas, no less indicative of the imagined national sensibilities which underpin the national identity. Carter has taken an ethnohistorical approach to the British hardcore business, combining the historian’s traditional source materials with interviews, description and interpretation to offer a fascinating journey through the colourful careers of two often-forgotten names of British porn – Mike Freeman and Ivor Cook. His exploration prises open some of the economic dimensions of the trade in smut and the significance of London’s Soho as a space with its own ‘rules of trade’. The impacts of these informal rules are traced, alongside the notorious history of the corruption and pay-offs to members of the ‘Dirty Squad’ (the Metropolitan Police’s Obscene Publications Squad) whose policing of Soho was often indistinguishable from the criminality they were supposed to prevent. The picture of Soho as the centre of ‘Swinging London’ and of the sexual revolution in the United Kingdom is complicated through this reconstruction of the close connections between sexual entrepreneurs and the forces of the State.

Sexual politics and new modes of social protest are absolutely urgent at this time, and as the UK government moves ever further down the road to censorship of the internet, Jacki Willson’s ‘Porn, Pantomime and Protest: The Politics of Bawdiness as Feminine Style’ is a timely exploration of resistive practices and a nuanced account of feminist politics and heteronormativity in radical protest. Radical protest has staged some fascinating tensions within and beyond feminism recently, and Willson’s account of the 2014 Face-sitting protest outside the Houses of Parliament in London analyzes the power dynamics and ideological overtones of such activism. The protest was unusual in its deployment of humorous violations of what counts as forms of public protest, and, as Willson demonstrates, utilized the performative aspects of ‘bawdy’ humour to register its critique of the proposed law which would see face-sitting and other non-violent forms of sexual practice outlawed. The activists’ unique use of fetish dress, class and humour is explored alongside earlier protests by Cynthia Payne in the 1970s and 1980s. Brothel keeper and campaigner Payne used humour alongside a particular high camp ‘kinky’ style of dress and English etiquette to undermine contemporary sexual norms. In 2014, the protesters made use of similar cultural types but also reclaimed two traditional roles within English pantomime: the Dame and the Principal Boy. The transgressive appeal of cross-dressing and the woman ‘on top’ might have some political potential but as Willson argues it is not without its critical limitations.

The critical insight about heterosexual femininity’s less-than-radical challenges to sexual norms also informs the exploration of another campaign in the United Kingdom. In ‘What Have We Got to Lose? Feminist Campaigning and the Exclusion of Sex from the Supermarket’, Jude Roberts and Melissa Shani Brown open up the reductive pro-porn/anti-censorship or anti-porn/pro-censorship construction of campaigning. Their focus is the Lose the Lad’s Mags Campaign which ran between 2013 and 2014, aimed at persuading retailers to stop stocking and selling ‘lads mags’ on the grounds that they were sexist and in breach of equality law. Rather than focus on obscenity or morality, campaigners deployed free market discourses and the rights of consumers to choose to be ‘free from exposure’ to such representations. While the campaigners argued they were not focused on the usual ‘taste and decency’ of other campaigns, the class distinctions which underpinned many of their arguments did, argue Roberts and Brown, reinforce more problematic binaries which ultimately shifted the focus onto the presence of sex, not sexism, within public spaces.

Our Forum is convened by Oliver Carter, and connects with his article elsewhere in this issue, focusing on the contemporary British Adult Entertainment Business. In a range of short articles we hear from those inside the industry – producer Terry Stephens and performer Mia Young – as well as from an academic project with a public health perspective which seeks to work with performers in order to understand their employment conditions and experiences. This issue also includes an obituary of Chuck Kleinhans written by Jeremy Butler, his former student and colleague, who remembers Chuck and his foundational contribution to the study of popular culture and pornography.

Reflections and looking forward

This is the last issue of our fifth volume of the journal and it seems like an apt time to reflect a little on what we have so far achieved. It has certainly been a very exciting journey and while we did not have a manifesto as such for the journal, there were ideas and plans underpinning the launch and some of those have come to fruition while others remain as goals to be reached.

To readers of this journal it is no surprise that pornography is seemingly never out of the headlines but perhaps it is interesting to note the ways in which some of the stories that pass as forms of ‘criticism’ have changed in the past five years. While public discussions of the aesthetics of porn remain locked into questions of obscenity and disgust, on claims of increasingly violent content, and consequent fears that content is just about revelation and extreme sexual acts, there has also been movement away from the moral concerns about images to a more ‘scientific’ focus on the problems porn poses for public health. Across the United States, porn has been designated a public health issue (Caplan 2017), although this story has its roots in the early 1970s (see, for example, Calderone 1972). In Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom there have been similar attempts to link pornography to a whole range of mental and physical health issues, and to other hot button concerns such as migration and trafficking, as for example in this overheated media story:

‘We consider pornography sex trafficking with the camera turned on,’ said Jason Adkins, executive director of the Minnesota Catholic Conference, which helped draft the law. ‘I think that’s an important point to drive home to people: When you use [pornography] you’re fostering and nurturing the sex-trafficking trade.’ (Klemond 2018)

This kind of ‘iceberg’ story is very popular in the press, sitting neatly alongside the journey into the ‘heart of darkness’ which characterizes what passes for documentary investigations of XXX screened on BBC3, Sky, Amazon and Netflix – wherein an intrepid young presenter begins their explorations of the ‘seamier side of sex’ by avowing their previous ignorance of the ‘depravities’ now being depicted in ‘blue movies’. We note how they all love the line that pornography is no longer just Playboy centrefolds! As the narratives unfold, viewers are invited to share the presenter’s increasing horror at the exploitation of young innocents, their pity for the hard-bitten veterans of the trade, and their mixture of wonder and shocked excitement at the images of brains whose patterns have been changed and thus the awful news that teenage boys cannot always rely on their erections. It is hard sometimes to not despair at the ways these representations offer up the ‘dark underbelly’ and its impacts – we could write the script with our eyes closed! Perhaps it is all too easy to make fun of this kind of production, but their impacts on the public conversations about sexual representations are not at all amusing.

What all those media stories of porn’s connections to ‘sex trafficking’ and to ‘public health’ tend to elide are the ways in which the business of pornography is changing while the levels of stigma and targeting of porn performers seem to be increasing. The move to online provision of content is well documented and stories of the new porn entrepreneurs such as Fabian Thylmann (founder and former managing partner of Manwin, now known as MindGeek) and their ability to leverage munificent funding from mainstream banking sources are almost as well known. Designated as a data tech company, MindGeek has been meeting with representatives of the British government and the British Board of Film Classification to discuss the roll out of age verification tools under the Digital Economy Act. The stories of exploitation and degradation only seem to matter when the perpetrator is a shadowy pornographer of the old school or a sex trafficker, but not when he (and it usually is a he) is dressed in a suit and labelled a dot.com entrepreneur. This seeming respectabilizing of some porn companies stands in stark contrast to the targeting of performers facilitated by data tech companies through compliance with FOSTA (Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act) and SESTA (Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act) legislation (intended to tackle sex trafficking) in the United States, as well as shadow-blocking and demonetization, that may well have significant effects on the visibility of performers and their ability to carry on working (Roux 2018).

Porn Studies is not about ignoring the problems of the businesses that make the content, nor the difficult work environments that performers must negotiate, nor indeed are we interested in simply celebrating pornographic representations and their production. When we established the journal, our intentions were to understand what is actually going on – understanding trends and dynamics, and to see how these connect to pornographies’ histories. To test out new theories and to establish forms of criticism which do not rush to straightforward condemnation, easy causation or exaggeration and which recognize the voices of those with skin in the game. Our ambitions remain the same. As we wrote in our inaugural issue, understanding the variety and complexity of contemporary pornography will require fresh perspectives and a commitment to developing criticism which enables us to see pornographies across the globe in their social and political contexts.

To date, articles published by the journal have begun to open up discussion of the practical and political uses of porn in different environments; we have published some work on the economics of pornography, although not as much as we would have liked or have hoped. This is still an area in which vague or exaggerated figures of massive profits and massive sales and massive reach seem to be de rigueur. We are still hoping for articles on the economics of porn making and distribution, and more expansive and thorough-going examinations of the forms and functions of pornography in specific geopolitical, contemporary and historical spaces. We have been pretty successful in our intentions to expand the usual realms of porn criticism – our authors have covered all formats, from film to video, from novels to magazines, from comics to sound – beyond the most obvious American productions to include European productions and, in coming issues, focus on Asian pornography. We want to encourage even more examinations of sexually explicit imagery outside of the Anglo-American–European triangle but we remain cognizant of the potential pitfalls and the very real dangers of studying pornography in some jurisdictions of the world, so this ambition may take some time to realize. We are always open to suggestions for special issues and particularly want to cross some of the disciplinary boundaries that tend to constrict the ways in which we can talk about pornography.

But it would be wrong to focus on the gaps to the exclusion of what has been published in the past four years. We want to celebrate the fact that more than 100 substantial contributions to the study of pornographic media have made it into print. We have had special issues on Audiences, Regulation, Gay Porn Now, Gonzo Production and Labour in Pornography. In general issues and in David Church’s special issue, authors have examined and expanded the list of films worthy of analysis. Going forward, Darshana Mini and Anirban Baishya are co-editing the special issue ‘South Asian Pornographies: Vernacular Formations of the Permissible and the Obscene’ and editorial board member Katrien Jacobs is co-editing ‘East Asian Pornographies and Online Porn Cultures’ with Thomas Baudinette and Alexandra Hambleton. Ricky Varghese is working on ‘Porn on the Couch’, which explores psychoanalysis and its links to pornography. Our forum sections are growing – most recently focused on surveillance, on public health and, in this latest issue, on British porn histories. A forum on Tom of Finland is in the pipeline and we are keen to receive proposals on other significant figures.

When the journal was launched we had an amazing response – not all of it favourable! But it did mean that visits to our online pages and downloads of individual articles started high and have remained so. Last year saw 40,810 full-text downloads from the Routledge platform. Many of our authors have achieved career-defining highs for their articles and some pieces have had very significant take up in popular media. All of this marks the journal as an important space and certainly we have had real impact in shifting and demonstrating that the study of porn is more than just an excuse to be controversial; that porn is more than sets of contents which contribute to the oppression of women or which are only for momentary experiences of pleasure. Whether focused on a forgotten writer from the 1890s or revisiting the claims about that 1970s classic Deep Throat which still stands in as the sine qua non of pornographic representation, articles published in Porn Studies have offered combinations of close textual analysis, contextual and paratextual framing and reflexivity, and have provided critical insights into contemporary culture and politics, and our ideas about gender, sexuality and bodies.

Porn Studies has been a shared endeavour; we have received a great deal of help from friends and colleagues, from those who agreed to be on our first editorial board and, of course, very substantially, from those who have been our reviewers. After five volumes, some colleagues have now retired from our Editorial Board and we are delighted to welcome new members to the editorial team. We particularly want to thank Giovanna Maina for her amazing work with us on establishing the Forum section and as a co-editor. As one of the indefatigable trio who have organized and facilitated the Porn Section of the Gorizia Spring School for more than a decade, Giovanna has been a very important figure in the development of porn studies in Europe. We will continue to work very closely with Giovanna as she joins our Advisory Board, and particularly as she will be co-editing a special issue dedicated to questions of ‘extremity’.

Our Advisory Board now also includes Kath Albury, Katrien Jacobs, Alan McKee, Susanna Paasonen and Rebecca Sullivan, as well as Lynn Comella who takes on the role of Reviews Editor. From the New Year, Lynn will be actively soliciting submissions from authors with books to review, and from those who would like to review. So, as we move into our sixth year, we say thank you to all the members of our founding team who were so instrumental in getting the journal to this milestone, and we welcome new members who will help strengthen and develop the journal into the next phase of its work. Finally, John Mercer joins us as a co-editor. John is the author of Gay Porn: Representations of Sexuality and Masculinity, and he has been a great colleague since the foundation of the journal – editing our Gay Porn Now! special issue and being very generous with his time and advice. We are delighted he wants to contribute even more! Here’s to the next five volumes!