Spanking, caning and consent play: how feminist porn frees women from shame

Can a feminist have rape fantasies?

According to feminist pornography producer Pandora Blake, who runs the fetish porn site Dreams of Spanking and frequently portrays fantasies of “non-consent”, the answer is a no-brainer. “Absolutely.”

The general consensus in the feminist porn movement is that no fantasy, no matter how anti-feminist the subject matter appears to be, is off limits. To tell a woman what she is and is not allowed to be turned on by is just about as anti-feminist as it gets.

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“Removing shame from hardcore BDSM desire and rape play and age play and all of the kinky taboos that women just have not been allowed to like ever, that’s the kind of stuff that really draws me into the feminist porn movement,” says Courtney Trouble, the producer behind Trouble Productions and a past Feminist Porn Conference keynote speaker.

“If we come out and say ‘I have a rape fantasy,’ it’s like, ‘Whoa, you are broken,’” Trouble says. “That’s the conversation, and it just needs to change.”

Feminists routinely fight for sexual agency – a woman’s right to make decisions about her own sexuality, including when and with whom to have sex, and when, if ever, to get pregnant. Feminists traditionally rebel against the forces that would hem in these rights: the puritanical voices that say that a woman who enjoys sex is a slut, that would restrict access to contraceptives, that claim that dressing provocatively is inviting rape.

Following that logic, feminists argue they shouldn’t invoke shame around the sexual fantasies of others – even if those fantasies include images of kink and domination, or even rape.

“There’s a clear distinction between fantasizing about being coerced, and actually being coerced,” Blake says, explaining that just because she has (and depicts) dark fantasies doesn’t in any way mean that she’s endorsing real-life nonconsensual sex acts.

“In some cases, people’s porn preferences contradict who they are in the world – as responsible people who are committed to justice and equality,” says Tristan Taormino, a feminist porn producer, sex educator, and organizer of the annual Feminist Porn Conference in Toronto. “And I’m OK with that.”

Taormino’s own porn focuses on female enjoyment, on diversity of bodies, and on the comfort and authentic expression of her performers. She often subverts the tropes viewers might expect to find in porn.

“Certainly there are things in mainstream porn that I think are stereotypical, or repetitive, boring, or even offensive,” Taormino told me, “but the answer is not to shut down porn. The answer is to make more porn.

“Most mainstream porn revolves around the ever-present erection,” she says, “which speaks volumes about how it really revolves around male pleasure, male desire, male fantasy. So I’ve shot scenes where a male partner will make a woman come with his hands, mouth or a toy without ever taking his pants off.”

She also includes scenes where women initiate sexual encounters, or where actors direct each other, rather than everyone seeming to know what they’re doing at all times. No pizza boys show up at the door only to mobbed by a gaggle of waiting co-eds. She makes a point to emphasize consent and mutual enjoyment.

Trouble’s porn also frequently focuses on subverting expectations set by mainstream porn. As a plus-sized performer who has been asked by mainstream producers to appear in porn with phrases like “chubby chaser” in the title, or asked to eat cake in porn scenes, Trouble delights in making porn where fat people are depicted as desirable. And while mainstream “lesbian porn” usually consists of scenes where stereotypical, feminine, straight female actors perform sex acts on each other for the enjoyment of straight male viewers, Trouble shoots girl-on-girl scenes with lesbian viewers in mind, and with butch actors as well as femme.

The feminism of Trouble and Taormino’s porn isn’t limited to the content – they are also strongly committed to a safe and comfortable work environment, fair pay, and a creative voice for their actors. This behind-the-scenes work is especially important for porn like Blake’s. While Blake doesn’t believe that the content of her work is at odds with her feminism, where it gets complicated, she says, is in portraying and sharing those fantasies without promoting actual violence toward women. In a world where porn is the de facto sex education for any teenager with an internet connection, socially responsible producers have to think not only about what will get people off, but what people will learn.

Blake says that making a big disclaimer about consent in the beginning of a film would break the spell of the fantasy, but the negotiation of boundaries that’s part of any healthy BDSM still needs to happen.

The Dreams of Spanking site includes tons of behind-the-scenes footage that shows what happens when someone calls cut (which she encourages her performers to do if they need or want to), or how the scene really does stop when someone uses a safe word. Rather than to-camera interviews where performers can feel like they’re on the spot to say the right thing (“I’ve lied in that situation,” she says), the Dreams of Spanking behind-the-scenes footage shows what really happens on her sets, so that viewers can see that everyone involved is a willing and enjoying participant.

Blake says she only casts people who are kinky in their real lives, whom she meets through the BDSM scene, to make sure that they know what they’re signing up for and that they’ll genuinely enjoy it.

“In a way,” she says, “I’m filming a live BDSM scene,” as opposed to actors depicting BDSM. “It’s about taking your authentic experience and turning it into a performance.”

Blake says that she’s always been kinky, since long before she knew what that meant. She remembers reading the descriptions of canings in Roald Dahl’s autobiography and being simultaneously fascinated and ashamed of her response.

“Even then I knew that it was not accepted to be fascinated by descriptions of other people’s pain,” she said. “All of us have to unlearn that received shame before we can enjoy ourselves and our sexuality, even if it’s the most pleasure-based sexuality, let alone when it’s anything outside of the norm.”

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She first discovered spanking as an erotic activity when she was a teen reading erotic fiction, but it wasn’t until she started exploring the world of online porn that she realized she wasn’t the only one who was turned on by the idea of spankings or canings more severe than playful smacks.

“What’s hot about spanking is the fear of it, the anxiety and anticipation of what’s coming,” Blake says. She likes to create scenes not where spanking just comes out of nowhere, but where a character anticipates it, “like a schoolgirl who knows she’s going to get a caning after school and can’t think about anything else and she’s asking her friends how bad it’s going to be, if it’s going to hurt.”

It’s not unfeminist to be a female submissive, Blake says, but it’s unfeminist to assume that someone in the BDSM scene is a submissive just because they’re a woman. She says that people in the BDSM scene, like people everywhere, have internalized ideas of gender norms, and that that’s part of what she’s trying to fight with Dreams of Spanking.

“The way to have sex in a feminist way is with consent, communication, and respect,” Blake says. “So if it’s possible to have sex that way, it’s possible to BDSM in that way, because they’re the same, really.”

Spanking, caning and consent play: how feminist porn frees women from shame