Jacky St. James Calls Out Anti-Porn Activists
Actor Rashida Jones says forward-thinking women need to reclaim porn as a feminist space. Jacky St. James‘s response? “Hey, we’re already here.”
Jones is poised to make a sequel to her controversial anti-porn documentary Hot Girls Wanted, one that will explore the alienating nature of contemporary relationships in relation to sex and tech. In a Hello Giggles interview promoting the new project, Jones notes that porn is a space just waiting to be overtaken by feminists: “I think there’s tons of room to reclaim that. I mean unfortunately or fortunately, everything is about consumerism. If there’s money to be made, there will be an audience and people will feel empowered and I truly believe that women haven’t fully tapped into their potential as a market.”
Writer/director Jacky St. James has shot back with a zinger of a response in a blog post that appeared on Tumblr earlier this week. The award-winning creator of the famous Emma Marx series lists a whopping rundown of 33 female porn filmmakers who are already doing just the very “reclamation” that Jones is so eager to see. (Among them are Dana Vespoli, Nica Noelle, AE Films alums Holly Randall and Julia Ann, Kayla-Jane Danger and many more.) “Do you realize that countless women have been doing this for decades? Do you realize how patronizing it is to women working in the adult industry to hear you say this as if it was somehow a new concept? It completely undermines everything that women have done for our industry and it discredits and diminishes the work of countless women,” St. James says in the post.
Angela White expressed similar sentiments in her 2016 podcast interview with Adult Empire. “I often get mainstream press in Australia because I’m this ‘rare’ person in the industry that has a degree and is actually politically aware,” she said. “But in reality, there are so many very amazing strong, sassy women in the industry speaking out about their views of pornography, about their experiences. Nina Hartley is probably the legendary example that I can put out there. I’m not the first person to defend my experiences in pornography. I think that if you argue that pornography is degrading, you really are just arguing that sex is degrading, because what we’re doing is essentially having sex but we’re filming it. With certain dramatic releases where there’s a script, of course there’s gonna be some acting involved. But we are just showcasing sex, so if you don’t find sex degrading, then I don’t know why you would find pornography degrading.” (Andrea Dworkin, one of the most vociferous anti-porn voices, said essentially that very thing in some of her writings, famously describing all sex as rape.)
In the same interview, White also expressed her frustration that non-industry people, typified by Jones, make sweeping comments about the nature of porn. “There’s so many of these really outrageous allegations made against the pornography industry. They’re unfounded. They’re not scientific. It’s really awkward when these arguments are being made by people outside of the industry and [they’re] not actually interacting with the people within it. There are so many people inside the industry saying, ‘I love what I do. I’m a sexual being. I love expressing my sexuality. I love sharing it with the world.’ But those voices are just not being heard. They’re just not being listened to. Unless a voice sort of matches with their argument, they’re just not listened to,” White said.
