Porn is usually a taboo subject and you don’t usually get a room full of practitioners and viewers meeting to discuss the issue in a light-hearted manner.
Porn worker and scholar, Dr Zahra Stardust, recently released a book that questions definitions and classifications.
Indie Porn: Revolution, Regulation, and Resistance combines Zahra’s own experiences with an analysis of the porn industry – it’s performers, producers, distributors and regulators.
The book was launched in Sydney last month at the Better Read Than Dead bookshop in Newtown with jokes about lighting, nipples and pixels.
The book seeks to be more down-to-earth about a topic that is often air-brushed away or regulated against, instead of examined.
“It’s impossible to zone out or skim read,” said Tilly Lawless, author of Nothing But My Body, who launched the book, which deals with sex, technology, rights and law after 15 years of research and practice.
After writing her PhD on pornography at the University of New South Wales, Zahra now works as a postdoctoral research fellow at Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology, exploring the politics of online sexual content moderation.
There has been a backlash against porn in NSW, she said at the launch, and a backlash against sexual health, rights and justice around the world more broadly..
She said that indie porn is a cottage industry in Australia because of criminal laws around its production, sale and screening. The dominance of tube sites and the architecture of social media mean that that there is pressure for workers to promote themselves like influencers.
“Indie porn is now the model of big tech,” she said. “You’re incentivised to build a brand.”
Some regulators make a distinction between porn and art, but this is a false distinction, Zahra says, “because porn can be artistic and art can be pornographic.”
She said that porn sits at the boundary between high and low culture. “Regulators think of it on the one hand as corruptive and contagious, and on the other as worthless and meaningless. Platforms see porn as a virus that presents a risk to brand safety.”
But she questions many of the categories used by both governments and algorithms. What does the term “sexually explicit” mean? Is it in the skin pixels, the nipples, the poses? How should sexual material be coded? Instead of seeing pornography as a fixed thing, Stardust argues that it’s meaning is contested: “Porn is a concept, a rhetorical tool.”
Stardust formerly worked as a stripper and porn performer and brings both her body work and intellectual work to the book.
She says that writing can be just as revealing as stripping and, speaking to her own ideas, is challenging the stigma of porn as something valueless.
She said that porn workers are trying to survive in a hostile economic environment, trying to build a base of ethical practice and that regulation often stifles the proliferation of diverse content.
Many students, she says, make porn content to fund their studies.
She says that instead of regulating against porn, the government could decriminalise porn, end financial discrimination against sex workers, fine platforms that use discriminatory algorithms, fund local porn co-operatives, and invest in comprehensive sex education and porn literacy.
Her insights into the industry include a critique of government classification requirements that incentivise the airbrushing of labia and criminalise queer sexual practices, and claims that indie sites offer alternative approaches to porn production, representation and distribution.
Indie Porn: Revolution, Regulation, and Resistance is published by Duke University Press and is available from selected book stores across Australia.
Image: Indie Porn: Revolution, Regulation, and Resistance – courtesy of Duke University Press
Words: Rhonda Dredge