Student presentation looks at queer issues in porn
Gender & Sexuality Center’s first-ever SexFest holds conversation to promote a more positive culture about sex and sexuality.
Before starting her presentation, first-year transfer student Katie Riedy gave the small group in attendance a warning that it would include explicit pornographic images and invited anyone who might be uncomfortable to leave.
Everyone stayed.
Riedy’s presentation, “LGBTQ+ Women in Porn: The Good, The Bad and The Utterly F**ed,” hosted on Monday, Oct. 18, was the second event of the University of Rhode Island Gender & Sexuality Center’s first-ever SexFest.
“With SexFest as a whole, we’re hoping to promote a more positive culture about sex and sexuality on this campus to hopefully, you know, make sure that people are enjoying their sexual selves,” Riedy said. “As they’re, you know, very often they are doing that on campus, whether or not people want to talk about it, and we want it to be in a positive way.”
The Monday was labeled as Porn Day, starting off with a presentation on racialization in porn then moving onto queer issues in porn with Riedy’s presentation.
While Riedy went through various PowerPoint slides, she was very inviting of people’s opinions and input to the point that the event felt much more like an informative conversation than a lecture.
One participant was senior gender and women’s studies and psychology double major Jessica Spalding.
“I was really looking into the idea of queer issues in porn; I feel like it’s not very much talked about, just in a general sense,” Spalding said. “I think that it’s incredibly thought-provoking to talk about these issues that we don’t really talk about outside of academia and certain things like that. There’s a lot of discussion online but it’s really nice to have a presentation that specifically goes over queer issues in porn.”
Once many of the reasons that LGBTQIA+ women may enter sex work were established, including increased risk of youth homelessness and drug addiction amongst the community and homophobic/transphobic work environments elsewhere to just purely enjoying sex, the issues and exploitation of queer women in porn specifically were examined and discussed.
Riedy mentioned the “Jaws Effect,” which is the theory that after the release of the 1975 film “Jaws,” audiences were more likely to be afraid of sharks, and it even led to an uptick in the hunting of sharks. She used this to show that media can have a violent, negative effect on behavior, which is why it’s so important to see and understand how that effect works in the making and consumption of queer porn.
Much of queer porn is made with a male audience in mind, filmed for the male gaze, to the point where both “lesbian” and “trans,” according to a 2019 study were in the top 10 most viewed Pornhub categories in the United States; “lesbian” being the second-most viewed category. This leads to the sexualization of women who identify this way, inducing “staggering” rates of violence in comparison to cisgender and heterosexual women, according to Riedy’s presentation.
Opponents of transgender bathroom equality even use the idea of the hypersexual transgender woman who they believe will sexually assault the cis women they’d be using the bathrooms with as part of their arguments; similar reasoning is seen in history with lesbian, gay, bisexual and Black people.
In 2021 alone, 40 trans people have been murdered so far; sex workers make up a disproportionate amount of victims, partially due to what’s known as the “trans panic defense.”
The defense is defined by the LGBT Bar as “a legal strategy which asks a jury to find that a victim’s sexual orientation or gender identity is to blame for the defendant’s violent reaction, including murder.”
However, even though there are clearly many queer issues in porn that have real-life consequences, there are also many positives attributed to queer porn taken from the Feminist Porn Awards. They encompassed what Riedy dubbed “ethical porn,” in which actors are treated with respect and paid fairly and are empowered by the work, as directors collaborate with the actors, even incorporating an actor’s own desires and fantasies. They challenge stereotypes with the depiction of realistic female pleasure and expand boundaries of sexual representation.
Riedy felt it was important to highlight the positives as well, especially as part of SexFest, which is meant to be sex-positive.
“LGBTQ+ women deserve porn that shows their real experiences so they can see themselves in some media we consume,” Riedy said. “Because, frankly, a lot of people do consume porn across the gender and sexuality spectrum.”