Original subtitles

A fiIm by Virginie Despentes

Summer 2005.

I cross the U.S. From west to east, from Seattle to New York,

through Los Angeles and San Francisco.

I meet with activists, photographers, artists,

fiImmakers, sex workers and theorists,

who in the 80s began a revolutionary movement:

A pro-sex feminism, pro-whores,

porn that is feminist, S&M, lesbian.

When we speak of feminism,

we often assume abolitionist feminism.

It treats any pornographic image

as an attack on the dignity of women and calls for its censureship.

It sees all prostitution as merchandizing of the human body

and calls for its criminalization.

Pro-sex feminism has the opposite strategy:

The body, pleasure, pornography,

and sex work can be political tools which one must seize.

Here, the discussion of those directly involved

outweighs the word of the experts.

Annie Sprinkle, Norma Jean Almodovar,

Carol Queen or Scarlot Harlot

have all written about prostitution in the first person.

Freed from censorship and victimization,

they claim the right to use their bodies as they see fit,

including for sex work.

The concept of obscenity is a totalitarian tool to reduce women,

ultimately, to a piece of flesh.

What is that in sex, especially women's sex,

what is it in the human sexual act

that is so shameful?

It's more than the ugliness, it's... a rejection.

People want to vomit, people...

or they're fine with it, with lust, etc...

or in a salacious way.

But to finally find the simple humanity,

just the beauty, with ugliness mixed in,

with people as they are,

it's in this delicate balance, finally, that it's touching.

There are few people who recognize it,

and who, if not the fiImmakers can show it

with human material, that is to say, with the true sexes?

I see absolutely no objective argument

that allows one to say that porn is degrading to women.

I had my first professional shoot in December.

The following ApriI I had my first cover of Hot Vid�o.

After three months, I fell face to face with myself in the street,

and it's true that the effect is quite striking.

Being a porn star, for me it was

to make a fool of myself maybe once or twice a month on a set.

It took maybe 10 hours of my life per month. It was nothing.

What does it mean, "pornography?"

It's a look focused on the human sexual act.

It carries a prejudice

and ethics outside the Judeo-Christian norms

because of nudity, obscenity,

an act of indignity to humans.

It's an indignity to humans even to believe these things.

Society states that the woman is a vault of dignity

that is emptied when she's committing sexual acts.

I think people are perverts, frustrated,

and that's their problem, whatever.

Because ultimately, the people who butt fuck, etc...

Sometimes I've been insulted by guys in the street.

And I said, "Wait, if you find what I'm doing so dirty,

"it's because you've already seen what I do.

"You must be interested.

"You see, you're curious about it, so you look.

"If people like you didn't watch, there'd be no girls like me."

Judgment is strong because people won't recognize the fascination,

the strength of the fascination.

And it's necessarily the object of their desire that causes desire.

And because it's repressed, it's wrong... I don't know.

People are completely twisted.

At least, much more than me when I was doing porn.

"Queer" is first of all an insult, in fact.

Actually it's very important, it really is an insult.

It's an insult that means fag, dyke, asshole,

deranged, sexual sicko, whore.

It indicates a sexual deviation,

a dissent from the sexual norm.

And so that insult has been

reclaimed by a set of micro- communities in the United States.

In the late 1980s, they turned this insult on its head.

It's quite incredible,

this hijacking of an insult thrown at you.

You pick it up and actually start working with the injury,

and an identity develops.

There was a huge surge

in psychoanalytic and sociological discourse on femininity

as construction, as parody, as performance.

Besides, the seminal text

was by a psychoanalyst named Jean Rivi�re.

It became the basis of all analyses, Queer analyses.

They actually began to speak of femininity just as a masquerade.

This performative or parodic analysis...

Well, it wouldn't happen the same way in relation to masculinity.

That's to say on the one hand

there's a deconstructive swell concerning femininity,

and on the other hand, a huge silence about masculinity.

Masculinity appears as a natural absolute,

and no one, in fact, thinks about it.

I don't like to make hierarchies, in fact,

about gender, sexuality, saying there are...

well there are butches, there are drag queens.

Then there are transgenders and transsexuals.

I think they have different ways of reclaiming a multiplicity

of the technologies of gender.

I refer the concept of Teresa Lorite,

these kinds of technologies of gender.

And these technologies in fact, they are often performative,

that is, they are only parodies or...

It's works about representation,

but sometimes they're biopolitical technologies in a wider sense.

And so we can work equally well with photography as with fiIm,

with a performance, with a hormone.

And for me they're different... different ways

of actually reclaiming the technologi of production of the genre.

Contemporary society, in any case from the 1950s,

is a society in which bio-women are...

systematically pumped with estrogen.

Every girl, in fact, from the age of 15, 16 years

wiII take the piII and be fiIled with estrogen and hence hormones,

in line with creating femininity in her body.

To my knowledge, there are very few boys with access to estrogen,

and it's not because it's hard to find estrogen in our society.

N the other hand, testosterone,

and here's a radical political shift,

testosterone continues to be a hormone

and also a political metaphor,

the use of which is stiII extremely restricted.

That's to say that testosterone is controlled, prescribed today

either medically or for the production of transsexuality

in the body of bio-woman. That is, for transformation into a man, period

Now, pro-sex feminism has crossed the Atlantic.

These European inheritors combine punk rock,

gender politics and trans/queer/dyke

to make visible the dissident sexual practices.

They refuse that the state or the cultural industry decide for them

what is presentable and what is not.

Mainstream pornography imposes on us restrictive requirements

of what is a man and what is a woman,

who does what to whom, what angle, how many participants.

Pornographic representation is a war.

To seize it is to change the imaginary,

to construct identities of resistance

That image is experimental, funny, edgy or exciting.

Nly one instruction: Do not leave intact any regulatory code.

The Postporn movement is a new stage of the feminist revolution.

By staging a deviant sexuality

that doesn't address the hetero male eye,

one chips away in the brain of the beholder

the resistances that others had implanted.

Postpornography undermines the castrating fiIters

that define virility:

A man does not touch the cock of another man,

and his anus should always remain locked.

In Barcelona, the new warriors of Postporn are punks,

insecure, feminist and politicized.

Armed with diIdos, mustaches, fisting, prostheses

and post-movida comic characters,

they claim all that mainstream pornography forbids.

Here, Mad Max confronts Judith Butler.

In 200, at MACBA, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona,

the marathon Postporno invited artists, activists, marginals

and theorists to work together

on an investigation around pornography.

Postporn had reached its critical mass.

Ah, follow, follow.

Fuck me, fuck me. - I'm going to make you work a bit.

I'll make you wait.

I'll make you wait. - Smash my ass.

Now, I'll break your ass.

I'll split you in two.

Nine years ago, when I arrived in Barcelona,

a Postporn movement began to hatch.

Queer, trans-gay-lesbian,

I was a part of it from the beginning,

and it continues to expand.

There have been many results.

It implements different politics,

much more aggressive.

When we started Girlswholikeporno, it was very militant queer,

very involved in the queer movement in Barcelona.

We were in the background: Queeruption, Judith Butler...

Confusion of gender,

against dichotomies: Man/woman, hetero/homo.

That was the birthplace of the project, Girlswholikeporno.

I find it politically very interesting and contentious

that women reappropriate the stigma of the whore.

In Spanish, the words "bitch" and "fox"

are often used as pejoratives

to describe women, especially free women.

I like to call myself or my girlfriends

"sluts" or "bitches,"

and I find that usage very liberating.

It's no longer to argue, "I'm good, I'm not a whore."

Kay, I'm a whore. It's my decision.

On a beautiful spring morning,

there was once a prostitute

looking for clients,

in order to make some cash.

She looked and looked,

Until at last,

after several attempts,

appeared a gypsy,

his briefcase stuffed with euros.

When they arrive at their destination,

the whore

begins to put the gypsy in a position

that is vulnerable and defenseless.

She presents him to her friend, the bitch,

and offers him

what appears to be a bunch of grapes,

ready to eat.

By now,

the Gypsy is caught between the claws

of these two unwise women.

The poor victim

cannot or doesn't want to imagine what awaits him.

Don't ask me how it happened, but we've put together

a lot of people who share the same interests,

who are friends, are all productive,

and there's a way of life...

ur leisure time and our time of political activity has merged.

We formed a network, compact and powerful,

that's giving us good results at this time.

This network also influences our individual work.

Everything produced is the result of ongoing cooperation.

F course, our work nourishes feminism.

Even if we've never fought in feminist groups,

it is influenced,

especially by feminist artists since the 1970s.

Ur main influence is mainly from within the queer discourse,

but this is not incompatible.

N the contrary, it forms a whole.

Let me take your picture.

Do what you want. Do you have a light?

Are you from around here?

Wait, don't move.

Give me a light, bastard!

No photos. Give me a light...

I'm doing it, okay? Where are you going?

In my house, fuck...

I want to fuck, too...

Go fuck your mother.

Your mother!

She fucks like hell.

Call me when you know how to eat pussy!

It's part of the relationship between the two of us,

a desire to play and try things,

especially in connection with photos, to explore sexuality.

Before discovering Postporn, it was, at first, a game.

Then, our readings enabled us to situate ourselves.

I used a diIdo before I knew what it means.

I developed myself against masculinity.

Because of my history,

at some point a rejection of "bio-men."

And to find new meaning in this rejection,

and to invent other types of practices,

I enrolled in feminism.

I'll shit on everything

with my crazy bitch voice.

Finally, I have a pussy.

I didn't choose it,

but it does not displease me.

I am a capricious kid who wants it all.

Perpetually dissatisfied.

It's possible that today these tools,

these weapons are destroyed.

It is clear that the lesbian scenes

aim get rid of all the old stereotypes of femininity.

We can say that the scenes are the sexualization of power,

the sexualization of strategic relationships.

What struck me in the scenes is how it unfurls to see beneath her.

The game in the scene is very interesting,

because although its time has a strategic relationship,

it is always fluid.

There are roles, of course,

but everyone knows very well that these roles can be reversed.

Sometimes when the games begin, one is the master,

the other the slave,

and at the end the slave becomes the master.

What seduces me about Postporn is its experimental side,

trying to talk about sex,

of sex and our desires,

with other codes.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

Sometimes it is incomprehensible,

sometimes you read the opposite of what you expected.

But this line of research

is what really interests me in Postporn.

I find it very exciting.

For me, Postporn...

I believe my own sexuality when I make Postporn.

I do not reproduce it, I create it.

It's like a moment of creation.

To break the barriers and say:

"Now I think I want, that which I invent?"

Yes, what was very important for both of us

is that sexuality is not an essence,

but a creative activity, buiIt little by little,

from which we create concepts such as gender.

The aim of Postporn

is not only to excite, like mainstream porn,

but to construct

and deconstruct majority discourses.

That's a creation.

Yes, sexuality is an artistic creation.

Previously, we weren't represented in mainstream pornography.

Or were represented by others.

So we took the reins to make our own porn,

adapted to our physical realities, our practices and our tastes.

The punk subculture seeks to liberate itself from

established production structures and production companies

and create its own independent labels,

its own media,

to organize its own festivals,

its own events,

conferences, etc...

All this with a reduced budget.

It gives strength

to notice that four or five colleagues

can achieve so many things.

We must reclaim our sexual representations,

in order to stop hiding.

I am not trying to escape patriarchy

to enter the convent of feminists,

where I cannot show a breast or speak sexually.

Giving visibility to our pleasure

and to our twisted sexuality

seems essential to me in order to emancipate us

and control the way we're represented.