The first time I discovered the salacious attraction of porn I was young, perhaps 10. A friend next door found a pack of playing cards in her parents’ room, and a group of us huddled in hushed wonderment—filled with fear, fascination and disgust—staring at the photos of men and women engaged in various sex acts. Of course, this was the sort of secret no child could keep, and once my mother found out, she banned me from playing there ever again. I was furious, and secretly glad. It was scary.
The next time I ran across nude photos, we were visiting a friend in a remote, artistic community, the sort of town to have an eclectic and independent bookstore. That’s where I encountered a coffee table book devoted to “Nudes.” Big, bold and filled with hundreds of photos, I sat for a long time on the floor, mesmerized. Instinctively, I knew that these were okay to look at; these pictures were different. At the time, I couldn’t explain why.
A few stolen viewings of pornographic films seen when I was a young adult left me feeling emotionally bereft. That my body responded with the motions of arousal when I saw what I saw only worsened my shame. Whether someone was titillated by what we saw, even if we were unwilling to admit to it, was the result of people being exploited. For this reason, I mostly avoided it, preferring my private flesh fantasies to watching others fuck for money.
It would take years to realize that for many women sexual desire came from regions several inches above our genitals, and that lubricating vaginas did not necessarily pulse in tempo with our brains and our hearts.
Naked Vs. Nude
Sexually explicit art moved me differently. The continuum of art and porn sometimes had fuzzy boundaries, and drawing the line between the two wasn’t always easy, but I allowed my intuition to guide me on this related journey down the path of subtle eroticism. In part, the difference had to do with perception, both of the viewer and the person being viewed. The discomfort I felt as a child when I was first exposed to these images now became clear—there’s a difference between nakedness and nudity.
For the sake of clarification, I define nudity as a state of intimacy and trust, free from implied or real subjugation, pretense and harm; to be naked, on the other hand, is to be stripped of respect, personal dignity and protection from the consequences, any consequences, of being viewed, objectified and used.
Accordingly, then, art elevates the nude—photographer, subject and viewer as well—so that we are left with a sense of awe and appreciation for the human form. It appeals to our higher mind.
Yes, it is evocative and quite often we may have a sexual response to it, but that is secondary to rendering us free from shame and embarrassment. Nudity sanctifies the human body, and is therefore art. Pornography exploits the human body, and is therefore not.
Porn For The Spirit?
Or is this the complete story? For some time, I’d known of a new genre of erotic film, one that put art into our voyeuristic jollies and replaced exploitation with tenderness, intimacy and awe. At once applauded and reviled depending on the camp to which a viewer might align himself or herself with, these films hailed as sex-positive and feministic; hot and furious with a woman’s pleasure at the center of the plot.
Call me irreverent if you will, but I couldn’t help but ask in trademark cheeky and serious form, just what would God/Goddess say about this new breed of porn? If a film could pass this muster, which from my open-minded, vanilla, heterosexual, man-loving feminist AND, perhaps most critical to this essay spiritual POV (don’t we all just love labels?), then the whole pornographic kit-and-caboodle got way more intriguing.
Forgive me if it seems to the posse of porn-appreciating readers that I’m coming to these realizations social-eons behind the times. Trying to reconcile Spirituality and Porn in one essay is, quite mildly, impossible to do. This called for research; in this case actually watch some films and talking to the experts.
I reached out to Jennifer Lyon Bell, producer of Matinee (2010, Blue Artichoke Films), a movie she described as an “explicit erotic film” that tells the story of Daniel and Mariah, stage actors who surprise their critics and audience with real sexual heat in response to assessments that the show lacks passion.
Matinee has gotten significant press in Europe, and recently won “Best Short Narrative Film” at the CineKink/NYC Film Festival, “Best Short Film” at the Melbourne Underground Film Festival, and Honorable Mention at the Feminist Porn Awards in Toronto.
I asked Bell, was there a place where naughty could play nice on film and in soul?
“There are a couple of reasons that I think ethically-made alternative pornography, including my own, could be an enjoyable and positive experience for a religious couple,” Bell explains. “Through the genuine respect that the lead characters, Daniel and Mariah, have for one another in the film, viewers glimpse the, ‘kernel of light’ at the center of every really transcendent sexual experience. You feel that the other person has truly seen you and that you have seen them, no matter how long you’ve actually known each other.”
Bell posits that “in truly great sex, the idea of selfishness disappears because your partner’s ecstasy becomes your own; you become more and more aroused by seeing them aroused. It’s a purely generous feeling. I’d imagine that many people could find that these emotions and feelings reflect and buttress those they are trying to cultivate in their own marriages.”
Daniel and Mariah disagree in Matinee
Says Bell, such couples watching Matinee might further be “drawn in by the interesting story and approachable characters, and relate to the film more like one they’d see in the cinema. By the time the sex scene starts gradually, they’d be able to enjoy it without being frozen by the embarrassment of realizing Aack! We’re actually watching porn together. And then they might find themselves turned on as the scene grows more intense … I like the idea that, after Matinee is over, the couple might be torn between the desire to discuss the movie’s plot and what ‘really’ happened, and the desire to turn off the film and make love immediately!”
“Does that mean we are in the midst of a creating a new sexual and spiritual film paradigm?” I asked.
“I hope I’m helping, in my own small way, to build that crucial cultural paradigm that delivers us from shame,” Bell told me. “As a self-identified ‘sex-positive feminist,’ I believe that women’s lives become more fulfilling when they can express themselves sexually without fear or shame … So many feel isolated because we’re not sure if our fantasies or wishes are OK.”
Bell’s conclusion? That ethically created and female-centered “porn and erotica are creative tools that can help you enjoy an imaginative fantasy, without actually doing anything you find immoral or scary.”
Will films such as Matinee convince the spiritual masses that feminist porn is a niche for them, too? There’s no telling how a mainstream culture still conflicted about real-life sexuality will ultimately respond to real-life making love on film, but I see it as a possibility.
There’s a scene at the end of the movie, after Mariah and Daniel have made love in which she’s staring back at her reflection on the mirror, and I couldn’t tell who was staring back: the lead actor, her film character, or the character she played in the story within the story. It really didn’t matter—all three were smiling, fully satiated and satisfied, humanely glorified.
I wanted to shout, “You go, Girl!” but I had, um, more pressing things to attend to.