First of all, I don’t watch porn. Well, I have to say that because 1) it is the truth 2) it is what most of the people say to hide the truth.

I am a French Student in Belgium, studying for a master’s degree in “Family and Sexuality Studies”. I was looking for a non-ordinary subject to study.

So why did I start paying attention about pornography? It started with two words “ Feminist Porn”. I was wondering if that meant the end of the mainstream Porn, a world without porn? I know that I can be pretty naive sometimes. However, my curiosity about a subject I knew nothing about (or only what I had in my head) lead me to dive deeply into this subject. In less than a month, I read a ton about Porn Studies, I contacted few Feminist Porn Producer (I got a meeting with ErikaLust’s Production in Barcelona)and I tried to understand what was behind the industry of sex.

So what is Post Porn? The post porn is an art’s movement that emerged in the mid 1980’s. It is a movement that want to promote sex-positive and to explore sex as an emancipatory tool for women. This kind of porn is kind of political. Pro-Porn Feminismist fight against the mainstream rules on beauty’s norms, domination by Men on Women, heterosexuality’s norms, the conditions of work (violence, not well paid, safety…)

Very Briefly, what is the mindset of Feminist Porn?

• Respect Women/ Men without any violence or without any consent
• Showing authentic female pleasures
• Focus on variety/diversity of bodies, sexual orientation, fantasies
• There is a story. It’s artistic, very erotic and the desire slowly emerges
• Develop and nurture your sexuality
• Equality of the sexes, boundaries…
• Fair-trade modes of production (caring for performers, fair labour condition)

In my opinion, the big limitation of Feminist porn (especially Erika Lust’s videos) is the non-gratuity. I totally support paying for quality work/fair work and I wonder with mainstream (free) porn videos, who will be willing to pay for that? Who really cares about the treatment of performers and fair-trade Porn? Do the paying videos not target a certain audience? For what kind of audience these videos for?

Also, should we see the Feminist Porn as a magic wand ? Let’s be honest, it is still porn where people get paid for having sexual intercourse in front of a camera. I believe in people’s freedom and that they make their own choices and following their desires with Post-Porn.

I believe that Sex can empower women. There is no need for Porn for that. Sex needs to be desacralised. As Women we have been used to being silent, not to express ourselves, not to have too strong desires, not to be too much. Being able to talk about sex freely without shame, knowledge of our sexual desires and expressing ourselves is the way that we can access what we want.

We don’t need porn, people or our society to tell us what we should do. To feel good with our sexuality, we only need to trust ourselves.

What’s Next?

• With two of my classmates who are doing a survey about Post-Porn Feminist for French Speakers. People got really excited to be able to talk about a taboo subject. Already 123 people signed up. When the research will be done, we will publish the results to let people knows what others think about porn
• If you want to participate in the survey (Only French Speakers): Inscriptions :https://goo.gl/forms/8jmcRJ2jAElo2WNq2
• I’m going to Barcelona at ErikaLust’s Prodruction in 2 weeks. I will publish an article about the interview.
• If you want to read a post-porn artist’s story.
• If you want to learn more about fair-trade Porn Production.
• If you want to read a  discourse of sexpertise between the three areas of pornography, sexology and prostitution (Article in French)