Feminists Celebrate Porn Industry For Having More Women Directors Than Hollywood

The industry most exploitative of women is now being hailed by feminists for having more women in the director's chair than Hollywood.

Writing for The Daily Beast, Aurora Snow heaps praise upon the porn industry for having a record number of female directors nominated for the XBIZ and AVIN awards – the two most prestigious awards in porn – and for allowing the female perspective to expand porn's creativity.

"Given the recent nominations, 2019 might just be the year of women in porn," exclaims Aurora. "Eight of the fifteen XBIZ Director of the Year - Feature nominees are well-known and widely-respected women within the industry. Additionally, the same can be said for nearly half of AVN’s 2019 nominees for best director."

Compare the porn industry's number of acclaimed lady directors to that of Hollywood, which has nominated only five women for Best Director in its whole history, and feminists have a new cause to champion. Never mind the fact that it takes considerably far more talent and craft to earn an Oscar nomination, let alone the fact that porn dehumanizes women by reducing them to lifeless caricatures, produced almost entirely for male sexual gratification.

Of course, the porn industry has not always been so, dare I say, progressive. Back in the '80s, the hey-day of video porn, only one female porn star broke ground by stepping into the director's chair, Candida Royalle, Snow points out. The tide began to shift in the 1990s, however, with the rise of Tristan Taormino, whose trailblazing set the porn industry on course into a new era of sexual equality regarding behind-the-camera talent. Snow praises Taormino as a "sex educator," noting that she "launched her career as a XXX director by personally transforming her 'Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women' from print to video, in a very a hands-on way."

Taormino says her "Gonzo" award was the porn industry's glass-ceiling. "I was the first woman to win in that category because gonzo had up until then primarily been dominated by male directors and male producers," says Taormino. "No woman had cracked gonzo at that point."

According to Snow, the women directors bring something special to a porn film that did not otherwise exist. Take Bree Mills for example, who previously one the XBIZ Director of the Year and AVN’s Movie of the Year awards. Her creations, notes Aurora, break the stereotype for "pretty-but-boring" types of porn movies directed by females. Other directors, like Kayden Kross, have widened the playing field by expanding their audience beyond the horny frat boys.

Male porn directors, such as Mike Quaser, prides himself on working with prominent women producers, and believes the added female perspective in porn has enriched the industry's creativity in countless ways. "Pornography directed by stereotypical horny males, there’s a lot of that, and a lot of it’s not that good," says Quaser. "To bring in a female perspective, even if it’s an incredibly perverse female perspective, someone like Bree Mills comes to mind, is good."

Feminists can champion porn for breaking the glass ceiling in whatever department they deem worthy, but none of that will change the fact that pornography as a whole has been damaging to women both in and outside the industry. From Fight the New Drug:

Studies have shown that most women—even if they believe that porn is okay for other people—see no acceptable role for porn within their own committed relationship. And no wonder! The evidence that porn can harm relationships and partners is overwhelming.

The fact is, porn reshapes expectations about sex and attraction by presenting an unrealistic picture. In porn, performers always look their best. They are forever young, surgically enhanced, airbrushed, and Photoshopped to perfection. So it’s not hard to see why, according to a national poll, six out of seven women believe that porn has changed men’s expectations of how women should look.

As writer Naomi Wolf points out, 'Today real naked women are just bad porn.'

The porn industry itself has barely even scratched the surface on its own #MeToo scandals, which, according to some former adult stars, is rife with sexual abuse that goes unreported or uninvestigated.

"There’s a huge tendency to not take women in porn seriously when they talk about sexual harassment," says former adult star Lotus Lain. "They’re often asked to explain why such-and-such sex acts were okay for them to do in one scene but not another. Or why they didn’t say something when they were on set as opposed to afterwards. People in our own industry don’t even support people coming forward. It’s messy."