CatalystCon: Spreading the Sex-Positive Message in Porn Valley

WOODLAND HILLS, Calif.—Therapists, polyamory advocates, academics, sexperts and sex-positive activists of all stripes came together for three days of seminars, workshops, social events and exhibits—not to mention more than a few group hugs—at CatalystCon West. It was the first time that the sexuality conference, started in 2012 by organizer Dee Dennis, had take place in Porn Valley, and there were some familiar faces from the industry in attendance, including directors, performers and pleasure product manufacturers. Feminist Porn Out Loud Not surprisingly, the term “feminist porn” was prevalent throughout. Director Tristan Taormino—who this year released an anthology on the subject—was seemingly everywhere; in addition to doing her radio show Sex Out Loud live from the conference, she participated in panels, took a big role in the opening keynote and a group discussion on “The Politics of Producing Porn” on Saturday evening (see more below). Academics were also well represented in discussions on feminist porn. On hand to teach “Feminist Porn 101” was Lynn Comella, a women’s studies professor at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. Constance Penley, a professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara, joined the discussion on “The Politics of Producing Pleasure.” Chauntelle Tibbals, a sociologist specializing in gender and sexualities who is currently at California State University-Northridge, posed the question of whether St. James’ Big MILF Juggs 3 was feminist porn. (The short answer: Yes, because it’s porn made by a feminist.) And Dutch commentator Marije Janssen, an expert in the field of media, sexuality and sex-positive feminism, talked about trends in the Netherlands in “From Slow Sex to Porna: A 21st Century Sexual Revolution in the Lowlands.” The intriguingly titled "Feminist Sex Wars and Beyond: 'Sisterhood' and Sex" brought together Comella and Dr. Carol Queen to discuss how "feminists" have handled sex-positive topics such as pornography, and in particular, the recently-announced academic journal Porn Studies, which will publish peer-reviewed research on the subject of pornography, and will release its first issue sometime in the Spring of 2014. Seems some anti-porn feminists have petitioned Routledge College, the journal's home, to either abandon the project, relabel it "Pro-Porn Studies," or start a second journal to be titled "Critical Porn Studies," which presumably would have an anti-porn bent. “‘Critical’ is not the same as ‘criticism,’” Queen noted, then followed with a discussion of the fact that there have been disagreements among feminists over sexuality since at least the Victoria Woodhull era of the late 1800s. Both speakers discussed a seminal sexuality conference that took place in 1972 at Barnard College in New York City, which pitted pro-sex feminists against the then-fledgling Women Against Pornography group, which spent weeks before the conference "outing" pro-sex feminists, to the point that a booklet outlining the conference's pro-sex slant was suppressed by university officials, and more anti-sex and anti-porn speakers were added to the roster. They noted that various papers presented at the conference were eventually published as Pleasure and Danger, by Carol Vance. "Feminism is a system of sexual judgment," Queen charged. Saturday's final session was a panel discussion of "The Politics of Producing Pleasure: Feminist Porn in Industry and Academe," and brought together an equal number of representatives of both fields: Jane Ward and Dr. Constance Penley on the academic side; Sinnamon Love, Danny Wylde and April Flores from the industry side, and Tristan Taormino straddling both camps. All, however, had contributed to The Feminist Porn Book, edited by Taormino. The anthology—along with others written or edited by conference attendees—could be purchased from a booth operated by the staff of Stories, a Los Angeles bookstore. Penley, who has taught courses in the sociology of the porn film, noted that anti-porn feminists had failed to delegitimize porn in academe, but noted the need for more research regarding porn, such as the impending publication of the journal Porn Studies. She noted that she was involved in the Media Research Project at UC-Santa Barbara, which will hold a conference on indecency and obscenity in February. Jane Ward, an associate professor of women's studies at UC-Riverside, began by asking the question, "Can we watch sexist porn and still have feminist orgasms?" Her answer was essentially yes, as long as one realized that the porn in question is someone's fantasy and that the viewer was not required to adopt the philosophy being presented. For example, she noted that she watches "a lot of porn," and that her favorite type is bukkake, with Ward imagining herself as one of the men ejaculating on the (usually) kneeling or supine woman. She noted that she is "drawn to sexual weirdness." The next speaker, April Flores, said that porn had taught her about her own sexuality, and that part of the reason she began acting in adult movies was to show that "fat women can be sexy." She talked for several minutes about the challenges of being a BBW performer, and how she felt she was a role model for women of similar body types. "My soul is being exposed in porn," she stated. Performer Danny Wylde talked about growing up in a progressive household, and learning at an early age that play is important—as is sex. He said he was concerned about what types of sex some of his fellow performers, and even women in society in general, will do for money—a thought that the next speaker, Sinnamon Love, who retired from adult acting several years ago, elaborated on. "People forget that porn is a job," Love noted, also opining that in some ways, sex work is a great class equalizer: Pretty much anyone can do it, and pretty much people from all economic strata have done. Towards the end of the session, someone in the audience asked the panelists what type of porn they personally liked, with Tristan Taormino admitting that she likes hetero anal porn with black guys dominating white women, while Love said she was a fan of "barely legal" performers. Wylde said he gets off on watching movies featuring the women he's worked with, and even likes to watch himself perform, while Flores is enthralled by watching young girls having sex with "old, old men"—and Penley said simply that she's a fan of "gay male porn." The feminist porn discussion was neatly capped near the end of the day on Sunday with a history lesson: “Lesbo Retro: A Dyke Porn Retrospective” featured footage from the ’60s to 2000 compiled by Shar Rednour and Jackie Strano, including such feminist touchstones as Suburban Dykes (a femme Nina Hartney and a butched-out Sharon Mitchell) and Rednour and Strano’s own classic, How to Fuck in High Heels. Toy Talk Another attraction for attendees of CatalystCon was the presence of pleasure product manufacturers, both in booths lined up in a small exhibit hall and on panels. Aneros, Crave, Nature Labs, Sportsheets, Tantus, Vibratex, Wicked Sensual Lubricants, We-Vibe and Wet all showcased products, and new tech company Slixa had a monitor set up to show attendees its new site for sex industry professionals. Saturday night fun was kicked off by Wicked Sensual Care, which threw a party with champagne and snacks in a 17th-floor suite. Sportsheets and Tantus sponsored a night of Sexual Jeopardy, where teams struggled to be the first to buzz in and give the correct question corresponding to factoids about myriad facets of sexuality, from animal mating habits and anatomy to Sportsheets and Tantus trivia. Speaking of Tantus, founder Metis Black returned to CatalystCon West to present the “Toxic Toys: Beyond Phthalates” panel. In her presentation, she noted that while phthalates are still a concern—they are the plasticizers used to make hard plastics and vinyls soft—they are not the only threat. Citing a 2005 study from the Danish EPA, in which 16 sex toys were randomly chosen and tested, Black said the agency found four of the toys had phthalates; one had timethytin chloride, which they warned could cause irreversible neurotoxic effects (brain damage) to progeny so shouldn’t be used by pregnant or breastfeeding women; five had phenol, which can cause harmful effects on the central nervous system; three had carbon disulphide also affecting the nervous system; 14 of the 16 had toluene; and one had cadmium levels so high that had the Danish government known, the product would not have been allowed into the country. She noted that when she started producing high-quality silicone toys at Tantus, retailers and other industry professional were not aware of the benefits of the material, and often balked at the cost. “No matter your income bracket, you don’t deserve to be exposed to chemicals because of your sex toys,” she said. She noted that for years retailers and sex educators have suggested using a condom over jelly toys, but that recent studies show condoms do not necessarily prevent leaching of chemicals. And too often, she said, consumers are shamed into thinking the problem is with them, and not the toys. And it’s not just jelly toys that can be problematic. Some wood toys come from trees that have been treated with chemicals or that have a fungus. “Just because it’s pretty and natural doesn’t mean it’s safe,” Black said. Her suggestion? Novelty manufacturers come together to self-regulate, similar to how the children’s industry did in banning phthalates from children’s toys, bottles and more. “We would get credibility with self-regulation,” she said. In the “Will Write For Dildos: How And Why Companies and Reviewers Should Work Together” panel, manufacturer reps and reviewers alike offered tips on getting started as a sex toy reviewers, as well as how to maintain mutually beneficial relationships. One of the most important—if not most obvious—suggestions was to keep the lines of communication open and honest. If reviewers will not get to a review for some time, they need to be upfront about that. And if manufacturers are asking to preview reviews before they post, state it clearly that’s not your policy. “Be honest in your review,” said panelist and blogger/reviewer Epiphora. “You have to care more about the reader than paying back a perceived debt to the toy company.” The Sunday panel “Talkin’ About a Revolution: Partnership Between Sex Educators and Adult Retailers” saw Black of Tantus again taking the stage, and this time she was joined by sex educator Charlie Glickman and Sportsheets founder Tom Stewart. The trio talked about how retailers should take advantage of training about toys and sex education when it’s available since they are often the clearinghouse for such information for consumers. “Sometimes retailers are the first place where people are getting this type of education and knowledge,” Glickman said. Stewart agreed, noting that people might be more willing to open up to a clerk in an adult boutique about sexual problems than therapists or their own physicians. While some retailers place a high priority on educating their staff and retailers—Good Vibrations, for example, puts staff members through 16 hours of intensive training on sex and sexuality, while medical doctors only receive eight hours of comparable training in med school—not all see the benefits. The trio of panelists agreed they have heard story after story from retailers admitting that their profits increased once they invested in training their sales staff on products and sexuality. But, they agreed, it’s hard to put that into cold, hard numbers. Black said too many corporations are focusing on the business model of opening more and more stores, but they need to buy into the idea of staff training. Glickman said he believes three parts are needed for success: Stores need customers willing to ask for education; manufacturers need to be willing to make products to address the needs of the customers; and staff members need to be willing to answer the questions and concerns of customers. Picking Up Sex-Positive Vibrations From a media relations perspective, two of the more interesting panels were Saturday morning's "Own Worst Enemy: Why Progressives and Sex-Positive Activists Struggle to Change People's Minds," by Dane Ballard, and Sunday morning's "Language Matters: How to Speak Sex-Positively So That People Listen," by Marcia Baczynski, both of which dealt with similar subjects: How to get sex-positive messages across to those who don't quite—or don't yet—have the ears to hear them. Ballard, a longtime sex educator who currently works for Kink.com, is a big proponent of changing the world by changing minds, but has understood that the way some activists go about such change actually turns others off to the message—so he devised a few strategies to overcome both internal and external resistance. One of his most important points was that activists should get their own thinking in order by being honest with themselves regarding their motives, and by understanding that their own worldviews may be at odds with the worldviews of those whom they'd like to change. He also suggested that activists who can't seem to express their message(s) well should enlist help from like-minded people who are better communicators, but to realize that personal evolution takes time, and that big changes are usually accomplished in smaller increments. And while he warned against having big expectations, he opined that when activists' enemies argue against the message, satirize it or even attempt to co-opt it, that should be considered a win, since it means the message is actually getting out to the public. Baczynski, on the other hand, dealt more with the linguistic side of the message, and her talk was heavily influenced by the writings of linguist George Lakoff, whose books Don't Think of an Elephant (which Baczynski specifically recommended) and the more elaborate Whose Freedom? should be essential reading for everyone in the sex-positive community. Baczynski's profession is as a relationship coach, and she's the creator of the concept of "cuddle parties," but she's obviously done a lot of thinking about how to express a message so that it actually gets through to its intended recipients. Most important, she said, were the "frames" (a popular Lakoff term) with which people deal with their ideas and philosophies, and she warned that challenging these frames directly will only put people on the defensive and make them less likely to understand the points being made. She advised listening to the concerns of those in the target audience, especially the way they express those concerns and the language they use, and to incorporate that knowledge into the way the sex-positive message is expressed. Perhaps most importantly, Baczinsky noted that most people see large, complicated societal problems through the more simple and familiar lens of the family unit, and noted that Lakoff had sussed out two main reactionary "frames": The "strict father" family model followed by most conservative thinkers, which is often at odds with the "nurturing parent" model that liberals tend to follow. She also made the important points that it's unwise to adopt one's enemies' terminology regarding the issues under discussion, and that it's not a good idea to challenge too many of the audience's deeply held assumptions at once, but rather to approach them gradually. One of the more practical panels that dealt with sex-positive message communication was Cunning Minx's "How to Be a Sex-Positive Educator (When You Still Love Your Day Job)" and the tiny brunette certainly lives that topic every day. A marketing exec by day, she also runs the podcast "Polyamory Weekly" and has been outspoken on the subject of non-traditional relationships. For Mynx, becoming a successful sex-positive educator involves quite a bit of planning and introspection, and being able to clearly state one's mission is first among them. She also recommended identifying and prioritizing tasks, and learning to combat work and life hindrances to achieving one's goals. In fact, she sits down every year and makes a list of things she's accomplished and would like to accomplish, and even breaks them down into monthly, weekly and even daily goals. At one point, she asked everyone in the audience to find a partner and discuss with him/her how s/he would describe him/herself, what that person does in terms of activist, and who the intended target of that activism is. She also recommended having one or more "buddies" with whom to discuss, perhaps weekly, one's personal wins, challenges and good ideas, as well as what one can learn from failures. Mynx noted that she takes to heart something she heard activist Charlie Glickman say years ago: "When you aim for good enough, awesome often shows up. When you aim for perfect, awesome rarely shows up"—and along that line, she urged those in the audience to "give yourself permission to take time off" from activism and actually have a life outside. The Media and Its Messages Other sessions at CatalystCon specifically tackled negative media coverage of sexual issues. In her session, "Torture Porn: Why the Trafficking Narrative is Seducing American Media." Sabrina Morgan brought out that trafficking has a "longer and more twisted history" than most people know, and that even knowledgeable, self-aware prostitutes may find that they fit the government's definition of trafficking, which brands all that have found themselves in sex work due to "force, fraud or coercion" as having been trafficked. She noted that many underage sex workers get in the business because they have no homes or resources with which to survive, and therefore earn their money on the street—but they're considered "trafficked" even though they themselves chose to do sex work. Morgan also talked about the many myths surrounding sex trafficking and sex work, and went into a little of its history, beginning with the "white slavery panic" of the early 1900s, which led to the passage of the Mann Act and the closure of the many brothels that could be found in major (and many minor) cities across the country. She noted that in those days, sex work was a form of women's liberation, since it paid well and didn't require a lot of education to do, but the press of the time devoted itself to spreading scare stories of black men and middle-easterners kidnapping naïve girls and turning them into sex slaves—and that many similar stories can be found even today. "When we look at these things, they start to fall apart," she noted, and urged the audience to "Keep reaffirming: Sex work is not trafficking." "Moral Panic" was the title of one Sunday session, though as it turned out, the "moral" part wasn't discussed nearly as much as the "panic," with panelists Dr. Shira Tarrant, Dr. Ebony A. Utley and journalist Amanda Hess weighing in on the various "sexual panics" they've seen in the course of their work and studies. Tarrant defined "moral panic" as "extreme and inaccurate widespread public concern about sex," and later agreed that its best antidote is sexual honesty—but as Utley noted, such honesty is hard to come by in modern society. She talked about the societal and political ramifications of infidelity among politicians, citing the affairs of Bill Clinton and others who'd had their escapades played out in the headlines. She also noted that the backlash of being unfaithful comes down harder on women than men, but that current TV series like Scandal, Betrayed, Mistresses and The Client List have put stories of unfaithful women all over current programming—and which Tarrant said added greatly to the sexual mythologies of our time, as well as being an important part of current pop culture, which is her own academic specialty. Hess noted that she'd profiled James Deen early in his career, and had discussed particularly his popularity with teenage girls. However, when she had provided information to a TV producer who had asked her about these "Deenagers" for a Nightline story, she was surprised to find that none of the younger ones had been interviewed for the segment, even though they were an important part of Deen's mainstream popularity. Tarrant's segment dealt with a particular interest of hers, "hook-up culture," a term she said she doesn't like, and noted was really nothing new: People have been engaging in "free love," "booty calls" and the like for at least 60 years—but the "moral panic" about the fact that college students are having one-night stands, even though at roughly the same rate as they have done for decades, has prevented the media and even some academics from looking at the practice objectively. She also noted that most mainstream stories on "hook-up culture" are lacking in depth, and focus too much on students although it's happening at all levels of society—and that no one seems to know what "hook-up" really means, since for some, hugging and kissing and nothing more still qualifies as "hooking up." Sex and the Syllabus Tarrant also moderated a Saturday afternoon panel, "Teaching Sex on Campus." She brought together four sex-positive activists, most of whom were still in school, to talk about their experiences in educating their fellow students about sex. For instance, the first speaker, Kelsey Brown, admitted to feeling "anger and irritation" over the fact that there seemed to be no comprehensive sex education being taught on her campus, and stated, "We need to stop asking whose job it is [to teach sex ed] and just fucking do it!" She noted that some professions tried to "scare us into safe sex," but wished they would spend more time talking about how to have a successful relationship with a partner—and about what the concept of "consent" in sexual relations means. She also noted that while most nowadays seem to get their sex education from porn, the genre is in fact fantasy, which she said is fine, but that people should know what the reality of sexual relations is as well. Another speaker, Andrea Tanase, began by stating, "Kelsey said everything," but nonetheless made several worthwhile points herself. She talked about her own sex education, which consisted of seeing, in middle school, a film of a baby being born (and being shocked by it), and as a freshman in high school, having a sex ed class that consisted mostly of the teacher warning about all the diseases one could catch through having sex. She said, however, that her sex ed experiences at UCLA were much more enlightening, though she deplored the fact that many universities these days try to cover up rapes and sexual assaults committed by one student on another. CalState-Long Beach student Mitchell Vandewitte, a political science major, said he felt that there needed to be more discussion about sex during freshmen's first-day-on-campus orientation assemblies, and that subsequent discussions of sex in class tended to be too impersonal, and panelist Brianna Plummer, another CSLB student, noted that in her early sex education, "not a lot stuck with me," and that although she had taken sex ed courses in her junior and senior years, even her favorite, "Human Sexuality," barely mentioned the concept that sex could be pleasurable. Education was the theme of the culminating event of CatalystCon: “An Afternoon Tea With Dr. Joycelyn Elders.” After attendees sampled treats from cookie trays and fortified themselves with caffeine, conference organizer Dee Dennis began the last session by thanking her staff, who in turn praised her and galvanized the crowd to offer up a standing ovation. Dennis introduced Elders without much ado. The former surgeon general, who was asked to resign by President Bill Clinton when she dared discuss masturbation as an alternative to abstinence as a well to reduce HIV transmission, proceeded to give a fiery speech titled about sex education as the ultimate weapon against STDs and teen pregnancy and the deep-seated attitudes that prevent the United States from becoming a more sexually healthy society. (The line that got the biggest laugh: “People say, ‘But Dr. Elders, condoms will break.’ I say, ‘Yes, condoms break. But they break far less easily than the vows of abstinence.’”) Following a brief speech, Comella conducted a Q&A session that covered Elders’ remarkable background, including how she was able, as the eighth child born to a family of extremely poor sharecroppers, to get an education and eventually become the nation’s medical authority. Elders also talked movingly about the events that led to her resignation from the Clinton administration and her fundraising efforts to help endow the Joycelyn Elders Chair in Sexual Health at the University of Minnesota. It was an inspiring end to a weekend filled with inspirational moments.