Abstract
Sexuality is often considered to be ‘naturally’ derived, and thus subject to discourses of authenticity. Through a discussion with non-exclusively heterosexual women performing lesbian sexuality in pornography, this article seeks to complicate ideas surrounding performance and authenticity. I argue that performance itself, by reiterating certain culturally salient codes, determines what is generally viewed as ‘authentic’. In addition, I argue that ‘authenticity’ is a mobile descriptor that may or may not be applied to a participant’s sex-work performances for reasons that go far beyond simple consistency between off- and on-camera sex acts.
‘Cut!’ is called, and two young women stop, shift, remembering their place while strategically tucking a stray hair, replacing a fallen strap … nothing too noticeable, yet entirely seen. The filming of pornography can be a long, tedious task that contradicts the flow of the end result. The process is often very foreign from the finished product, what went down on the set being completely different than what is eventually viewed by consumers.
Pornography is of vital interest to the social sciences, because ‘sex entertainment teaches ways of seeing and ways of being. It shapes and fosters attitudes, expectations, patterns of desire, of arousal and response and other overt behaviours’, both reflecting and influencing beliefs and actions, validating certain cultural fantasies and expressions (Carse, 1995: 166). Performance – both the deliberate dramaturgical and the unconscious reiterative work of subjects – inundates social life, and in the performative realm of pornography, I argue, there is space to learn about sexual performance as it happens off screen as well.
While not necessarily the goal of all pornography, the question of whether or not pornography captures ‘authentic’ sexuality has been debated by many groups concerned with representation. This work examines the experiences of non-heterosexual women engaged in ‘girl-on-girl’ displays of sexuality. While definitions vary, girl-on-girl for the purpose of this article refers to lesbian sexuality performed with the intention of being consumed by a predominately heterosexual male audience. I propose that performance is not antithetical to authenticity, but rather provides a frame for what is considered valid and authentic. I argue that we must problematize the very concept of ‘authenticity’, that it may be applied to scenarios for a wide variety of reasons. Performativity is entailed in all sexual activity, and those of us who use it for employment are in a unique position to reveal the ways in which identity, culture, and desire inform sexual experience and understanding. My research is restricted to a particular city in Canada and thus different cultural milieus would certainly result in different findings.
Performativity and authenticity as theoretical subjects
The crux of this article is performance, but what is meant by this? Richard Bauman (1977: 9) speaks of performance as a process that erects ‘an interpretive frame within which the messages being communicated are to be understood’. How the performance is to be read is ‘keyed … accomplished through the employment of culturally conventionalized metacommunication’ (1977: 15–16). Communication carries within it guidelines for its own interpretation. This metacommunication consists of explicit and implicit messages of how to interpret a given communication in a culturally salient way.
What is interesting about pornographic performance is that this metacommunication draws from the frames of sex and gender, performative in themselves. Since the 1970s and 1980s social sciences have acknowledged gender and sexuality as largely constructed rather than organic or essentially derived (Gamson and Moon, 2004: 48). Through the work of theorists such as Goffman, we understand the performative nature of our social lives, and that gender and sexuality are key components of that performance. It should be noted however that performativity is not a ‘singular or deliberate “act”, but, rather … the reiterative and citational practice by which discourses produce the effects that it names’ (Butler, 1998: 283). While performance, like theatre, may be understood as a one-time act consciously adopted by an individual and then set aside, ‘gender is performative in the sense that it constitutes as an effect the very subject it appears to express’ (Butler, 2004: 363, italics in original). The act of repetition creates the very thing that it claims to simply name, in this case, femininity or masculinity.
Like gender, sex acts themselves are highly scripted. Simon and Gagnon’s scripting theory shows us that while sex usually occurs in intensely private places, it is nonetheless social and has both an implicit and explicit audience. Sexuality is often understood as derived from and expressed through a purely biological urge, but is a ‘learned way’ of interpersonal expression which takes its meaning from the historical and cultural milieu in which it is performed (2003: 492). Jackson and Scott (2007) propose that for sexual activity itself to be meaningful and pleasurable it needs to draw from this bank of legible codes, which are created not solely through innate desires but also through socially salient ways of representing those desires. While this does not preclude agency and improvisation, it does impose certain limitations as to what formulations of sexuality are conceivable or legible, or accorded more or less value.
Finally, queer theory has further proclaimed that all sexual orientations or identities are ‘arbitrary, unstable, and exclusionary’ (Seidman, 1996: 11), in part because gender is not the only characteristic influencing our partner choices (Gamson and Moon, 2004: 54; Sedgwick, 2005). Therefore gender, sex and orientation are statuses that we create and sustain through the consistent and repetitive display of culturally salient acts, utterances and gestures, providing the illusion of a stable and natural inner core or essence. In doing so, our coherency (or lack thereof) to other social actors is established.
Pornography is interesting in that it must be read through various other performative frames. It is consumed and understood through a labyrinth of unstable premises coming together through legible codes that trigger sexual excitement according to culturally meaningful illustrations of desire. As Laura Mulvey has said, film creates ‘the illusion of looking in on a private world’ despite existing for the express purpose of being seen (1998: 270). This is particularly salient in pornography because one of its purposes is to bring the viewer into the sexual action (usually ‘private’) and eliminate the space between the viewer’s body and the bodies onscreen. Pornography ‘relies on a tension between presence and absence’ in that the images ‘serve the purposes of the real thing in absentia’ (Gowans, 1980: 141, italics in original). In order to bring the viewer into the scene, for it to be pleasurable, the forms of desire presented must be legible according to larger, culturally salient patterns of social and sexual interaction (Escoffier, 2003: 536). This is done in part by the viewer’s ability to predict the action or otherwise have their expectations met (Simon and Gagnon, 1973). What makes pornography so effective is that it works from highly canonized scripts, for ‘Once you grasp the trend of a form, it invites participation’ and ‘collaborative expectancy’ (Burke, 1969: 58).
A large part of this participation hinges on the viewer’s understanding the sex acts as being ‘authentic’. They must believe in the credibility of the performance. Much literature has problematized the taken-for-granted nature of the authentic, ‘arguing that authenticity is a socially constructed phenomenon that shifts across time and space’ (Vannini and Williams, 2009: 2–3). It is ‘an evaluative concept’ (Van Leeuwen, 2001: 392) linked to ever-changing cultural or idiosyncratic norms and ideals, and thus cannot simply be equated with some supposedly objective idea of what is ‘real’ as this concept itself is highly ambivalent. One could argue that ‘authenticity’ is bestowed to pornography when the sex being watched is interpreted as ‘really happening’ (actual penetration, for example) and is understood as pleasurable to the performers – that this is what they would do ‘in their real life’. Here I show this simplistic divide between reality and fantasy is complicated by the lived experiences of the performers.
Lesbians in mainstream media
I Kissed A Girl
I kissed a girl and I liked it
The taste of her cherry chap stick
I kissed a girl just to try it
I hope my boyfriend don’t mind it
It felt so wrong it felt so right
Don’t mean I’m in love tonight
I kissed a girl and I liked it … I liked it!
The lyrics to Katy Perry’s popular 2008 single summarize some of the themes common to mainstream portrayals of lesbian sexuality. Lesbian forays are expressed as occurring between heteronormatively feminine women (cherry chap stick), as experimental (just to try it), as non-threatening to male partners (hope my boyfriend don’t mind it), as deviant (it felt so wrong), and as not legitimately emotional (don’t mean I’m in love). ‘Other than heterosexual male fantasies about two women together’, writes Elizabeth Whitney, ‘which more often than not do not take lesbianism seriously, lesbianism is not acknowledged as legitimate’ (2002: 117). Alexander (2007), Jackson (2009) and Thompson (2006) note that most mainstream media representations of women being sexual together occur between normatively feminine women, portraying such encounters as experimental or ‘practice’ for straight sex, as performance rather than genuine (thus non-threatening to compulsive heterosexuality), and as titillation for the hetero male gaze.
Pornography both reflects and influences mainstream media, and many of these same codes are found in girl-on-girl pornography. Common themes that emerged in one study of ‘ersatz’ lesbian pornography were framing of sex acts as ‘first time’ or ‘experimental’, heteronormative feminine appearances, and an emphasis on penetration (Morrison and Tallack, 2005). In my own brief review 1 of websites and videos, I noted tag lines such as ‘Hottest pillow fight ever’, ‘watch innocent teens lose their lezbo virginity’, or ‘the only thing bigger then (sic) their tits is their taste for pussy’. Ideas about stereotypically beautiful and innocent women experimenting with lesbianism are thus found in both mainstream and pornographic media.
The foregoing codes are only true of a certain genre of girl-on-girl; other fetish, ‘alt’ or ‘queer’ pornographic depictions of lesbian sexuality fall completely outside of these codes. Alt or queer porn, such as Crash Pad, Queer Porn and No Fauxxx position themselves quite differently. Indeed Crash Pad’s website makes claims to being ‘Authentic Lesbian, Dyke, Trans, Queer Porn’ (emphasis mine), and features women and transfolk who do not fall into dominant gender displays, who engage in sex that is not hetero- or homonormative. 2
Sex work as a research subject
As Jessica Monthony (1999) points out, what makes sex work an interesting venue for studying the nature of gender construction is the fact that sex workers consciously ‘participate in, embody, and act out this sexual (dominant heterosexual) script’ (28). For the majority of people, performing their gender is less conscious than for those in the sex trade, who often engage in a very rehearsed adoption of certain practices that ‘expose gender and sexuality as nothing but a construction’ (20, emphasis in original). As a result ‘what gets challenged for the audience is the construction of their own gender and sexuality’ (31, emphasis in original). Research regarding sex work is useful precisely because ‘Consciousness about the construction of sexuality and gender within sex work appears to open up a space for consciousness about the construction of gender and sexuality in society at large’ (28).
Pornography is therefore well positioned as both reflective and creative of culturally normative sexual codes. We learn the ‘grammar and syntax’ of validated acts and arousal via pornography and other media. This grammar is ‘learned by actors from other actors’ (Jackson and Scott, 2007: 108) in that we are all drawing from the same pool of cultural knowledge about sexuality and reinterpreting it through those stylized and approved forms. Performers therefore integrate and perpetuate the institutionalized means of experiencing and making sense of sexual pleasure.
Methods
While not a distinct or bounded community per se, my participants are connected by having worked at the adult livecam 3 studio where, at the time of writing, I performed and managed for six years. 4 It is through my involvement in the industry that I both came to find the subject of pornographic performance interesting, and reached my participants. In the last 10 years I have worked for dozens of adult-oriented websites, ranging from livecam to fetish films, performing in web-based, photographic and video works. I have performed in pornographic webcam shows, films or photo sets with six of the participants. I was lovers with three co-performers, and it is the blur between these ‘sex acts’ on and off camera that is, at least in part, what is at stake in this article.
Because participants engaged in girl-on-girl work in a variety of contexts our discussions covered a variety of adult work: livecam, photo sets, fetish and niche video clips, mainstream girl-on-girl video shoots, BBW 5 girl-on-girl shoots, same-sex BDSM 6 videos and spycam instalments where a camera is ‘hidden’ in a woman’s bedroom. Some participants also worked as Professional Dommes or escorts, but the research restricts itself to camera-mediated contexts.
In terms of sexual identification, participants often chose multiple words when trying to define their sexual experiences and desires. Participants’ answers ranged from: ‘heterosexual/closeted bisexual’ (Milla), ‘bi’ (Dana), ‘queer’ (Judith, Ruby, Agatha, Miyuki), ‘pansexual’ (Judith, Kitten), and ‘omnisexual’ (Xev) as well as markers such as ‘polyamourous’ (Judith, Kitten) and ‘Maternal Domme’ (Kitten).
The ethnic homogeneity of my sample is consistent with the lack of ethnic diversity among those who have worked at the livecam studio 7 (all participants were white identified except for Miyuki, of half Korean/half white ethnicity). The issue of how ethnicity and race relates specifically to the experience of girl-on-girl porn performances is a topic of great interest (although there do exist ethnographic accounts of the experiences of African-American women in pornography, e.g. Miller-Young, 2010). One may hypothesize that this ethnic homogeneity reflects how certain venues of sex work discriminate more or less depending on ethnicity due to assumptions or realities regarding viewer preferences. It has been suggested that in terms of perceived ethnosexualities, whiteness is coded as innocent (Gamson and Moon, 2004: 53). Innocence being one of the underlying pillars of much girl-on-girl pornography, it is possible that producers are less willing to hire ‘aggressive’ Black or Latina women because of a preference for ‘innocent’ whites or ‘timid’ Asians, according to underlying racist sexual stereotypes.
My research consists of eight audio-recorded interviews with non-exclusively heterosexual women 8 working in the adult industry conducted from November 2009 to January 2010. After taping, interviews were partially transcribed and analysed using the grounded theory approach. By continually revisiting my data as my analysis progressed, allowing similar answers, phrases or sentiments to emerge, my main analytical categories were derived. The age range of the participants at the time of interview was 22 to 31, with a mean age of 25.6 years, and their time in the industry ranged from one to eight years, with a mean career length of 3.5 years. Participants are presented under pseudonyms of their choosing.
Revealings
Overall, the sexual atmosphere and acts engaged in for work did not reflect participants’ personal sex lives. Nevertheless the theme of authenticity recurred in our discussions, showing that these two concepts are not mutually exclusive. Based on their answers, ‘authenticity’ at times referred to a likeness between their on- and off-camera selves, but was not restricted to this definition. Authenticity is problematized by performers as more a gradient than an either/or scenario. Authenticity, or at least a close facsimile, was generally seen as a difficult yet desired achievement, actively sought out by performers for strategic reasons, such as client appreciation and cultivation, product quality, and self-satisfaction. In other cases performers sought to actively distance their work from their off-camera self.
Partial personas: Compelling belief or drawing the line
Interviews often started with a discussion of on-camera persona. Many women did not adopt a significantly fabricated alter ego. Rather, they generally emphasized or de-emphasized certain aspects of their personality. For example, Judith (27 November 2009; 26; 4 years in industry; livecam, video and photo) says:
I’m pretty much the same person … I’ve got the same flaws and the same insecurities when I’m performing and I think they come through very clearly … it’s very strange because I have a background in acting [both laugh] but for some reason when sex gets thrown into it I can’t act, like, I can’t … I just, I become so incredibly honest. I like to think that that makes me human and likeable to somebody who’s watching it because to me I find the most interesting performers bring themselves into their work. And I feel like you can sense that sort of falseness if, if it’s there … if you start trying to become something that you’re not it just becomes painfully visible to anybody watching it. I’m rocking the awkward nerdy girl who has this kinky side, but I don’t feel like it’s much of a performance [it’s just] nurturing that side … If you let someone be themselves, if they have a real beauty that you don’t try to mask with lip gloss and hair, people will see it … For some guys who are looking for the big titty blonde girl, she’s out there, you can find her. But you won’t find her in my room. You’re gonna find some dork wearing a red plaid lumberjack shirt. You’ve got to be polite, you’ve got to be charming, you’ve got to try and get people what they need and want, um, you’ve got to try to sell. If you’re having a bad day you’ve got to hide it; if you don’t feel like accommodating people and making them feel comfortable, if you don’t feel like accommodating people’s sexual desires and making them have orgasms, you still have to figure out a way to get the work done … I don’t feel like I have a strict alter ego like yeah, Ruby is not that different from myself, Ruby is just one aspect of myself, she’s the girl who gets that work done. I don’t think that I’m good enough with improv[isation] or care enough to make a really elaborate alter ego … it’s just certain aspects of my personality that are emphasized.
Xev (6 January 2010; 22; 1.5 years in industry; livecam, video and Pro-Domme) suggests that she ‘magnifies’ certain parts of her bubbly, flirty personality, and both she and Judith further point out that maintaining a fully fictional character or multiple personalities would be exhausting over time. Thus we see that the base characteristics of these performers are not strictly altered for work, but rather they integrate various elements more or less part of their ‘true’ selves in accordance with the best personal and economic strategy. Cyberspace studies have helped us rethink the supposed distinction between ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ spaces and identities (Boellstorff, 2008) and how distinctions between online fantasy personas and ‘real’ personalities tend to implode (Waskul and Lust, 2004). Likewise, fantasy personas created by sex workers generally draw from their ‘real lives’ since aspects of the self are not employed in easily segregated, utilitarian ways (Abbott, 2004; Frank, 1998; Sanders, 2005), but also as a strategic move so as to ‘compel belief’ in one’s client. This is particularly important when sex workers wish to cultivate loyal ‘regulars’ where a personal service is expected and one must engage in ‘a prolonged performance of authenticity’, one that does not hinge so explicitly on the monetary exchange (Frank, 1998: 179–180).
Nevertheless, some performers did feel they engaged in a more conscious creation of a performed self. Milla (23 January 2010; 23; 5 years in industry; video and livecam), for example, says ‘for my videos there is a very big dividing line. Milla is me, I am Milla obviously but I am cuter than me, Milla is cuter, like (she giggles ridiculously) you’ll never see me laugh that way in real life. That’s why I’m popular on the web, because I’ve got this stupid fucking laugh.’ Likewise, Agatha (8 January 2010; 22; 1.5 years in industry; livecam) prefers to maintain a strict distinction between her work and life, noting how she has a fairly elaborate make-up ritual before working. She fabricates a fake life history and persona, stating ‘Agatha also giggles a lot more easily at terrible, terrible jokes that I’m not even sure are jokes.’ She prefers that the activity and ambiance of her performances be very inauthentic, because otherwise it feels ‘too close to home.’ This relates to the absurdity of performing lesbian sexuality for homophobic men. ‘The same guys who would be yelling “dyke” at my girlfriend and me holding hands in the street are like, “oh it’s so hot” during a show’. Thus a general theme is that the more mentally separate work is kept, the less one cares or wishes for the acts to seem authentic to or reflective of their lives.
Faking fucking? Sex acts and the coding of lesbianism
The majority of work discussed with participants envisions heterosexual men as the target audience – while women certainly consume porn, producers tend to market towards what is seen as the predominant buyer. Thus, the sex acts are shaped by hetero-male fantasies and ideas about female sexuality. While a lot of kissing was common in shows, most participants noted that flirtation and foreplay held a much larger role in their personal sex lives than on screen, where you get ‘right to the action’, particularly in livecam scenarios where pay-by-the-minute rates are at stake for clientele. There is also an emphasis on oral sex in pornography, which is not realistic in terms of safer sex. Ruby notes how:
There is an obsession, there are popular misconceptions about what lesbian sex is in straight world culture, that [it] involves a lot of oral sex … depending on what the nature of your relationship is that’s easy or not easy because if you’re not in a monogamous relationship that’s a dangerous activity so it’s easier to avoid it than to fuck with a dental dam.
There is a common cultural assumption that women sleeping with women have no use for safer sex practices such as gloves, dental dams, or the use of condoms on penetrative toys (a telling illustration is that subscribers to the spycam 9 website Ruby was affiliated with made comments via the online bulletin board following our ‘show’ – many noted confusion as to why we were wearing nitrile gloves). Insisting upon one’s preferred risk-reduction methods can be complicated by a producer’s presumptions about what their clientele desire. This proved frustrating for a number of participants, who found producers and viewers either confused or dismissive towards the use of such precautions, resulting in some performers (myself included) losing jobs because they refused to compromise safety.
Penetration was also emphasized in work contexts. Both Kitten and Judith were insistent that penetration is not the ‘be all/end all’ of female sexuality. One study asserts that dildos do not typically feature centrally in the sex lives of women who sleep with women, and if so, they are not necessarily used reciprocally (Bolsø, 2007: 564). However, that phallic objects would be used in lesbian pornography intended for men is not surprising, for it creates what may be called the male viewer’s implied participation – the emphasis on penetration and whether or not ‘sex’ may occur at all without at least one penis present stands at the core of lesbian erasure. As Luce Irigaray (1985) has posited, lesbianism, indeed all that is feminine, is understood in terms of male frames of reference, and so ‘there will be no female homosexuality, just a hommo-sexuality
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in which women will be involved in the process of specularizing the phallus … ’ (101, emphasis mine). Susan Lydon (1970) discuses how ‘woman’s sexuality, defined by men to benefit men’ results in an emphasis on penetration, for to locate orgasm in the clitoris allows women to seek their sexual gratification independent from the phallus (201). That said, some performers expressed genuine enjoyment of penetration, but also noted that they preferred a certain kind of penetration, generally with clitoral stimulation. Ruby points out that rather than penetration, ‘grinding crotch on crotch, crotch on leg, you know, crotch on anything!’ is a common practice for queer women that is not ‘super interesting when you are a straight man looking at lesbians on camera.’ She goes on to say:
I like a lot more attention paid to my clit than any straight man is interested in seeing. I don’t like a lot of vigorous motion on my genitals. I like things to be moved slowly and with intention and I think that is also something that doesn’t read well on camera in a way that’s interesting for consumers.
Agatha also felt there is a much greater emphasis on symmetrical activity in pornography, (i.e. both go down on each other, both penetrate each other with a toy, back and forth in turn). Dana noted this as well. When using a double-ended dildo for her livecam duos, their bodies had to mirror each other and be positioned so as to not block the camera, even if this was not the most effective way to use the toy.
The idea of symmetry relates to one of the codes of female sexuality exemplified by girl-on-girl pornography. Agatha feels that in girl-on-girl both women are expected to be ‘super femmey’ and submissive. Miyuki (23 January 2010; 24; 4 years in industry; livecam, video, photo and escort) notes how if there is fisting or BDSM involved, the work will be coded as ‘hardcore’ or ‘fetish’ as opposed to girl-on-girl. In order not to disrupt the heteronormative codes, neither female is presented as ‘more of a man’ by displaying dominant sexual characteristics.
What the foregoing suggests is that performers did have diverging views about what sexual acts they enjoy versus the legitimating codes of female/lesbian sexuality as conveyed by their clientele. However, it is more the context of a work scenario and one’s relation to their work, rather than the acts per se, that seems to have the most impact upon how ‘authentic’ or not a sexual scenario feels.
Is it sex? Marking authenticity
Filmed sex is constrained by camera considerations, presumptions about lesbian sexuality held by the viewers, and performers’ personal preferences. I asked participants if, despite this, their work felt ‘like sex’, in part out of curiosity as to whether or not they and I (for those I had performed with) had the same feelings about our work together. As the type of work affects and influences the experience and resulting performance, answers varied depending on whether we were discussing photo sets, video, livecam or spycam scenarios. Whether or not a work context was more or less conducive to ‘sex’ relates to fluidity and filming constraints, direction, negotiability, consent, and desire.
As Miyuki points out, participating in photo sets with other women did not feel in the least like sex because of the amount of posing; holding motion statically so it may be caught on film eliminates any sense of fluidity and spontaneity. At the other end of the spectrum, because the sex Ruby and I had during the instalment of her spycam was in no way directed by an explicit, audible audience, it was considered more authentic because it would have occurred regardless of the camera’s presence.
When performing a directed video shoot, production models vary. Sometimes a ‘shot list’, general theme, or detailed script is defined by the producer; other times the models and crew discuss potential scenes and film in a more improvised way. In all cases though, models and crew make compromises involving the desired product and performer preferences, abilities, and boundaries. The concrete constraints produced by filming sex have an impact on what sex acts will be presented, and how. Many respondents noted it can be difficult to capture certain acts because of the logistics of filming angles. Sexual pleasure is impeded by the need to ‘open up’ to the camera (be it livecam, photo or video) to create aesthetically pleasing rather that particularly comfortable body angles. ‘The fact of the matter is’, said Ruby ‘if it feels good, it’s hard to see it, and so in an effort to be able to display sex in a way that’s filmable so that it reads and triggers the senses of the viewers, we sort of developed half, like, styles of having sex that are a little impossible’. The need to film sex that visually triggers the audience is viewed as a logical necessity. Performing sex this way is not ‘fake’ but rather tries to capture the appropriate and accepted visual cues to create the desired effect.
Negotiation and consent were a major factor in creating the right work environment for most performers. Many expressed that part of their filming preparation includes discussing things with their co-performer(s), gauging boundaries, preferences, safer sex practices and limitations. Even the positioning of their cervix or comfort in the length of one’s nails is discussed, as Xev states, in order to make the work experience as fun and comfortable as possible – not unlike negotiating consent and preferences in their personal sex lives.
For Judith and Agatha both, negative experiences resulting from lack of negotiation have led them to stop working with other performers in livecam contexts. During a film shoot, discussion prior to the action is easier as the crew sets up or checks lighting and other factors. In addition, activity can be cut, edited, and rearranged to work around any necessary discussions that occur mid-process. For live shows, performers tried to negotiate ahead of time, but as Agatha notes, she experienced an occasion when a second performer arrived unexpectedly to ‘join in’. During a show, if feelings have not been discussed beforehand or change mid-stream, it is difficult to negotiate because the client is essentially directing the action as it happens and can see and hear everything that transpires during the show.
Because of the lessening of agency in the absence of these temporal breaks, hostility toward certain conceptions of female sexuality was most evident in the context of streaming livecam shows. Dana notes that when she performed livecam duos with a friend whom she had also slept with off camera, there was a tendency for clients to want to tell them how to pleasure each other. She says, ‘mister mister on the other end of the camera thinks he knows exactly how to make a girl cum because of what he’s seen in the videos, so he’s giving us a little instruction and for example tells me “yeah I want you to finger her really hard”.’ To avoid actually hurting each other they would ‘trick the cam’ in order to make the client perceive vigorous action that was not in fact happening. Dana further notes that despite the appeal of a duo show residing in the idea of watching two genuinely attracted women enjoy each other or ‘doing their thing’, the clients wanted to remain the focus of their sexuality and time on screen, dictating the action and having their names spoken aloud.
In light of all these factors, most felt that their work encounters resided in a grey area in terms of ‘real sex’, that sex itself exists on a spectrum, or that defining it precisely was not overly important to them. Desire also played a role. If desire was more genuine, if they knew the other performer(s) were also attracted to women and to themselves in particular, it might feel more like sex and less like work. Miuyki notes that if she knows ‘where her (the other model’s) desire lay’ it feels more like sex, in part because the co-performer ‘knows what she is doing’ with another woman. As Kitten reminisces about moments when true chemistry is caught on film, she sighs, ‘when it’s effortless, it’s just so great’. Though she adds that if chemistry is not present, she is still happy to have ‘helped someone make money’.
When desire is present, however, it does not necessarily follow that the performance will feel like ‘real’ sex. As Ruby notes, ‘filming with my friends makes the work enjoyable; it doesn’t make it my sex life’. Even were she shooting ‘queer porn’ that was more reflective of her own sex life, she maintains that it would still be work, just more likely to be a genuine turn-on. A few remarked that they would consider their work more in terms of having made porn together, as opposed to having had sex together.
In video, especially when improvised by the performers themselves and not by strict direction from a live viewer or producer, it could come closer to feeling like sex, because the same elements of ‘real’ sex were in part present. Participants espouse certain codes of what sex is (physical definitions varied, but common elements were desire and an unimpeded ability to improvise and be spontaneous), but recognize this to be a more or less applicable label due to their unique access to varying sexual contexts.
To summarize, while not entirely reflective of their sex lives, most performers did not feel that their work was entirely inauthentic but rather a labour of negotiation and compromise. They emphasize or de-emphasize personality traits as a strategy to make their work the most fulfilling and profitable in terms of how they wish to relate to it. They either distance themselves through pure acting or identify with it by espousing something more genuine. Filming constraints were always acknowledged, but participants made frequent note that the ‘performative’ aspects of their work were no different than in other work contexts, nor entirely absent from their personal sex lives. Whether or not work performances constituted authentic sex related to various elements, of which consistency with one’s ‘real’ sex life was only one.
Discussion
My purpose is not to say that there is one ‘true’ lesbian sexuality straining to break through the misguided desires of common culture, nor that commodified sex acts are necessarily less genuine than uncommodified ones. No authentic sexuality of any sort exists, if by authentic we mean timeless, inherent and naturally given. Jeffrey Weeks (2003) argued quite exhaustively that sexuality draws its meaningfulness from the historical and cultural context and the relevant ‘truths’ produced therein. The body itself and its responses are not natural givens, they require interpretation. Thus to coherently ‘see’ a female body in girl-on-girl action requires decoding by the viewer as well as the performer’s self-reflexive process of drawing from those same codes to imagine how one is seen and respond accordingly. Sensations and acts, to trigger performers and viewers, must be coded as sexually significant, for:
how they [bodies] are sexualized (for example, divided into erogenous zones) may well affect how bodily acts and sensations are perceived, ordered and experienced in the progress of sexual encounter: which body parts are brought into play, which stimuli are interpreted as pleasure. (Jackson and Scott, 2007: 100–101)
Acts and pleasure may very well be ‘real’ yet they still entail performance (Jackson and Scott, 2007: 107), be it simply adopting certain displays or exaggerating experience in a way that is meaningful. Xev’s discussion of online orgasms is telling. While she has a ‘real’ orgasm when working and very rarely fakes one, she still emits an ‘over the top’ expression of it, to make it clear to the viewer, to signal that this ‘real’ physical thing has occurred via ‘unreal’ vocal signifiers. In one’s ‘real life’, salient coding still exists but simply in different forms, performed for a different audience – our partners.
Performance, as in the ‘reiterative and citational practice’ (Butler 1998: 283) does not preclude authenticity. Performance is the means by which ‘authenticity’ is established as a category. At the same time, participants complicated any strict notion of authentic sexuality in their descriptions of the blurry lines between when ‘sex’ had or had not occurred. What makes a particular show or performance ‘authentic’ can vary greatly, and only hinges in part upon whether or not the acts performed mirror one’s personal, ‘pure’ sexuality and sense of intimacy. As Katherine Frank (1998) has argued, the idea of ‘real’ intimacy or ‘pure relationships’ in a post-‘women’s liberation’ era seeks to establish a utopian ideal of totally free and rational egalitarian relation building. This is supposedly hampered when a relationship is commodified because it disrupts this ideal of equal power relations and purely desire-based decision making (194). Pornography, as commodified intimacy, is often attacked for being ‘fake’ and ‘cheapening’ this ideal of something pure and true, desecrating a beautiful, ‘natural’ thing. Some of my findings are telling. At the beginning of our interview, Judith’s boyfriend was in the room, and our discussion turned to whether or not he felt those Judith had worked with were ‘sex partners’. ‘No, it’s not really sex because it’s not sex for sex’s sake’ he says. Similarly, Dana reports the boyfriend of a woman she did shows with preferred their first playtimes be on camera – they were thus less ‘intimate’ as they had an ulterior motive, and so did not constitute infidelity in his eyes. Xev regarded playing with women for work as a means to enjoy extra-relational sex without it being too uncomfortable for her or her partner. Sex, to be viewed as authentic, must be understood as having ‘pure’ motivations (as if any sex is ever purely based on nothing but unfettered desire!).
As Frank’s (1998) research of women working in ‘gentlemen’s clubs’ argues, intimacy is a highly complex state constituted through ‘real’ and ‘manufactured’ processes. Because sex work entails ‘emotional labour’, where ‘seeming to love their job … has become part of that job, and actually trying to love the job … makes the work easier’ (Frank, 186, italics in original), it involves the juggling of ‘truth’ and ‘fantasy’ such that ‘we were always performing, however, we were not always pretending’ (197, italics in original). Indeed, inauthenticity is required for the copasetic running of many social interactions, not just those that are commodified (Waskul, 2009). Thus at any given time we negotiate between states of more or less genuine emotion in ways that do not compromise our being a coherent self.
As mentioned earlier, work personas inevitably form out of these various realms of the ‘true’ and ‘untrue’, and the construction of genuine intimacy and satisfaction in work scenarios is equally inextricable from the formulaic or directed aspects of the encounter. Perhaps the uncommodified is indeed more genuine than the commodified (or simply genuine in a different way?), but valuing them differently simply because they are different blinds us to oversimplifying how relationships fulfil us in and through various means (Frank, 1998: 196–197). As such, what authenticity is can be highly mutable, a mobile descriptor depending on what is important to the performer. For example, some models receive strong sexual satisfaction through their work. Dana is excited by an audience, and Xev is able to have ‘plenty more orgasms’ because of voyeurism. Xev and Kitten felt that working allowed them access to unique scenarios they found sexually exciting and provided ‘a space to experiment’. Or they may identify with their work in a political or artistic way: Xev, Kitten and Milla all expressed desires to ‘open up [a] world’ of pleasure for people, ‘portray sex in positive ways … and push the envelope’, or create productions that mirror their vision of hot sexuality. ‘I do view working with media as a lifestyle’, says Kitten, and for those who felt strongly about the potential of their productions to be inspiring, or venues for their own creativity, ‘authenticity’ became a more valued label to apply to their work (in contrast to performers like Agatha who desired detachment). This is in keeping with Bernstein’s (2007) work, where in applying Bourdieu’s theory of a work ethic of ‘fun’, she found that middle-class sex workers were more likely to integrate some sense of meaningful personal satisfaction and sexual liberation/experimentation into their work philosophy. So while these performers retain the idea that sex can feel more or less genuine, it is neither the sex acts being consistent with their personal preferences nor the monetized aspect that determines this.
For those who feel consent and negotiation are highly important, authenticity was more likely to be conferred to productions where they felt a strong sense of agency and mutual respect among performers and producers. Live contexts or un-negotiated filmed scenes would be more often viewed as simply ‘work’ or avoided altogether. And for those who felt spontaneity and improvisation were key, fluid, undirected productions were more likely to be viewed as authentically sexual and personally fulfilling, whereas rigid photo sets or highly scripted scenes would not be viewed as such. Sexual desire could play a key role for some performers, as this introduced elements of ‘chemistry’ and eclipsed the more contrived aspects of the performance. Yet since desire also resides in wanting to make money, art, a statement, a sense of identity and so on, ‘pure’ desire is never so simplistically figured.
Because ‘true’ intimacy is supposed to entail ‘pure’ motives, ‘fakeness’ in sexuality is devalued. It follows that sexual encounters and performances that we do denote value to are seen as necessarily containing some element of ‘authenticity’ by mere opposition. Simply put, if fake equals ‘bad’, than good must equal ‘real’. The motives can be ‘pure’, but what those motives are can differ dramatically. Simply filming sex that is similar to sex off-camera was not required nor enough for the resulting intimacy and sexuality to be considered genuine and more authentic. Thus, authenticity is not so much a predetermined state of being that one may attain, but a way of conceiving how one moves through one’s work. It is an evaluative label, residing upon a spectrum, which designates a certain satisfaction with work that is meaningful for a wide variety of reasons. As Kitten bluntly argues, ‘sometimes people’s faked orgasms can be better than their real ones’. Value manifests in many forms.
Performers acknowledge the filming constraints of their work as a necessary issue, because the camera needs to ‘see’ the action in order for it to trigger the viewer. These performed narrative and visual scripts, communicated via pornography, are what constitute that which is understood as ‘authentic’ for many viewers. More than this, the insights of my participants emphasize that we need to be less simplistic in terms of what is real and what is fake and acknowledge that our desires are multifaceted and thus fulfilled in a variety of ways. The placing of a narrow definition of ‘true’ intimacy upon a pedestal not only devalues other sexually and relationally satisfying encounters, but also minimizes the extensive overlap between the ideals and motivations that compel us to seek, and ends up producing, something that we consider genuine.
Conclusion
My initial question was a misguided one. In beginning this project I focused on the difference between performed and authentic sex acts among people who experience lesbian sexuality both in work and play. I anticipated that participants would express hostility towards the codes governing mainstream pornography, that they would regret perpetuating displays of lesbian sexuality that did not mirror their reality. Asking this question implies that there is something of sexuality and gender that we can call ‘authentic’, and that authenticity is equitable with what one ‘really does’ in bed. When I asked her to comment broadly on the girl-on-girl genre, Ruby saw through my hypothesis and stated ‘I feel like the question is meant to lead me towards commenting on long fingernails and stuff like that.’ Through my interviews with co-workers, friends and lovers, I realized how much more complex their (and my own) interactions with sex on camera had always been.
Ruby and I are speaking about when we had ‘real’ sex that happened to be broadcast over her spycam. She says, ‘Were the camera not there it would have been a different kind of performance. It is still performative, performance is always taking place.’ We joke that before falling onto her bed, I quickly signed a release form acknowledging a camera was in the room, scrawling my name in the first available medium, a thick red marker. Was signing that release form any different to consenting to sex with verbal or body language? Is there any difference between performing for a camera and performing for myself, my partners? I wish I could go back to that evening and determine what precisely made it ‘real’ sex for me, what precisely authenticated that moment. If the ‘authenticity’ value of any given sexual encounter is so mutable, we must rethink the very meaning and purpose of our sex lives.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I wish to express my gratitude to the brilliant performers who shared their thoughts and insights with me. I also want to thank Christine Jourdan for her guidance during my research, Sandra Teresa Hyde for her tireless help editing, and the constructive and thoughtful suggestions of three anonymous reviewers.