LaBruce, who has just completed a parody porn film in the fashion industry, said in a telephone interview that he was not surprised by the recent resurgence of negative attitudes towards porn. “The idea that porn is a masculine way of controlling women — that was the providence of the Christian right,” he said. “Now left and right are a bit reversed.”
Anthropologist Gayle Rubin, who sided with the “pro-sex” feminist side in the 1970s and 1980s and opposed calls for censorship, said over the phone that pornography was “easy to pick up” because it historically marginalized socially and legally.
Five movies to watch this winter
“Do you know in movies that you think the monster is dead, but it just keeps coming back?” she said. “These assumptions about porn just keep popping up, going back more than four decades.
“A lot of people just don’t think as rigorously about porn as they do about other topics. Porn is a special case in how it’s treated intellectually, which is bad — even among philosophers and others who should know better,” Rubin said.
While the porn industry isn’t known for critical reflection, there are events like the Berlin Porn Film Festival, an annual gathering that aims to provide new perspectives on the genre – artistically, socially, and even philosophically. Paulita Pappel, a porn performer and director who is one of the event’s curators, said porn was often “a mirror of wider issues in society”. She added, “The more we scapegoat and stigmatize it, the less room there will be for porn to be diverse, and the less likely we are to change the bigger issues.”
When Lust screened her first full-length film, “The Intern,” at the festival in October to a sold-out audience at the festival, many in the audience—men, women, and gender neutrals, usually between the ages of 20 and 30—said that she came to see the film looking for an alternative to traditional porn.