Beyond ‘Girls Gone Wild‘

Produced by and for lesbians, Dyke porn is emerging as a corrective to mainstream girl-on-girl

CANDICE VALLANTIN THE UBYSSEY (UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA)

VANCOUVER (CUP) — Brenda Robbins is an up-and-coming pornographer in her 40s who headed west to Vancouver to become a firefighter after she finished a degree in film studies at the University of Manitoba. But she says her ambitions as an independent filmmaker were never put to rest

“My plan all along was to be a firefighter and to do porn on the side,” recalls Robbins, who describes herself as “wanting to do porn for years and years.”

After more than 12 months of trying to get hired by a local firefighting department, however, Robbins finally cracked. “I decided, screw that. If [dyke porn] is what I really want to do, I’m going to pour all my energy into it and make it my job. So that’s what I’m doing. I’m starting my own business, I’m dedicating my life to it.”

Six months into the project, Robbins has already shot a few scenes and begun developing her website, gooddykeporn.com. So far, there are only a few teaser pictures available foreshadowing things to come, but Robbins hopes it will become a “sex-positive online community” — more than just a source of dyke porn.

Growing pains

Good dyke porn: have you ever heard of such a thing? Chances are you haven’t, because there simply isn’t a whole lot of it out there.

Robbins is one example of a new class of independent female filmmakers who are bringing women together on the silver screen in the hopes of broadening the limited selection of erotic entertainment available for women. It’s a unique attempt to launch a new niche in a thriving adult entertainment industry that consistently excludes women from working behind the scenes.

While pornography for lesbians certainly isn’t widespread, it isn’t entirely new either. In 1985, Nan Kinney and Debi Sundahl, producers of Fatal Media, created the first lesbian erotic film, Private Pleasures and Shadows, created by women, for women.

Although Fatal Media continues to create erotic films, this daring new genre lost momentum in the mid ’90s until SIR (Sex, Indulgence and Rock ‘n’ Roll) Video, produced by couple Shar Rednour and Jackie Strano, began creating erotic lesbian films with a slightly educational appeal. In January 2001, their feature film Hard Love and How to Fuck in High Heels was awarded the best all-girl feature at the AVN (Adult Video News) awards in Las Vegas, otherwise known as the porn Oscars. This was a surprising victory for a woman-produced film intended for a female audience, since this category is often reserved for traditional “girl-on-girl” movies featuring blond plastic babes fondling each other for a male audience.

Most recently though, Pink and White

productions, a one-woman operation run by Shine Louise Houston, has dominated the dyke porn scene since it released Crash Pad in 2005. Robbins says it is pretty much the only dyke porn movie most rental stores will have. “It’s become synonymous with dyke porn,” she says.

Some are simply unhappy with this narrow selection of erotic female-oriented films. When contrasted against the extensive proliferation of male-oriented hetero and homosexual porn available, this handful of movies certainly isn’t something to get overly excited about.

Hey ladies, I mean, guys

One challenge that has perhaps stunted the growth of the dyke porn industry is its rejection by both the mainstream world of adult films and that of radical feminists such as Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, who promoted anti-porn legislation in the ‘90s. As a result, pornography has been categorized by some as a form of entertainment that harms vulnerable women through coerced subordination, and sexual abuse.

But Robbins argues her films are a form of empowerment rather than one of oppression.

“That’s my goal, to show that women do have sex and women love to have sex and it’s empowering to be public about it within our community,” she said.

In fact, Robbins’s concept was so appealing to some that she received 10 replies within a day of posting a request for models on superdyke.com, an online lesbian community.

Shay Kingston was the first to reply to Robbins’s request and so far she has already shot a couple scenes. Tall, outgoing and feminine, Kingston, who was once a professional model and dominatrix, wanted to participate in the project, “because I’m an exhibitionist and I just wanted to try something new.”

She filmed her last scene with her transgendered boyfriend Oliver, a cute blond and blue-eyed boy with a Dennis the Menace-type smile, last Saturday. The two met on superdyke a couple of months ago and have clearly been infatuated with each other ever since. Although they agree that shooting scenes in complete silence with four other people in the room focusing cameras and booms on you can be a bit awkward at first, they both emphatically agree that neither coercion nor abuse plays a role in such a project.

“Everybody is going out of their way to make sure everyone is comfortable. The actresses come up with their own scenes, and Brenda is just the director of photography really,” Kingston says. She smiles and looks at Oliver and they laugh. “Besides, no one is signing up for the money, because it’s really not that fabulous.”

Both of them seem excited about contributing to the creation of something new, especially in a genre that lacks luster. “What I don’t like about dyke porn is that it still feels like it’s been directed by a man. You see the same penetration close-ups you would see in a mainstream girl-on-girl.”

Oliver chimes in. “And when you have feminist politics involved, it tames it down a little because you can’t have anything that qualifies as being submissive to a man.”

Robbins’s project differs from the dyke films of the ’80s and ’90s because it isn’t explicitly political and it is more inclusive of the whole queer community, including those who, like Oliver, identify as a man rather than a woman.

And while Robbins emphasizes that she encourages anyone to model for her films, Kingston and Oliver hesitatingly admit image is important.

“The problem with the stuff from the ’80s and the ’90s is that they’re really into real people with real bodies and well . . . some of them just aren’t that attractive. You can’t pick up on

their fantastic personality so all you have is the visual.”

And . . . action!

Breaking from the traditional mold created in San Francisco, “the mecca of dyke porn,” Robbins hopes to fulfill her goal of providing an entertaining, sexy alternative for lesbians looking for erotic films. She is currently toiling away in the hopes of meeting the April 16 deadline for the Queer Film Festival.

“I’m hoping they’ll want to show it, but there are no guarantees so I’m going to do the best I can and make something to be proud of.”

Although she is only in the early stages of production, she is looking forward to launching her full website in August of this year and is crossing her fingers, hoping for a full film release at the Festival in October. “Either way, I’m going to be launching it at that time and I’ll have a big party anyways.”