In this place, what are you doing, a wonderful girl?
Whatever business women have into that is controlled by males, we have all seen some variation of this. The adult entertainment business, like mainstream media, has a tendency to be especially condescending to women who work behind the camera as well as in front of it. To make matters even more challenging, historically, males were seen to be the “primary” consumer of porn and women weren’t thought to be capable of producing a product that would appeal to them. Many women have worked to dispel such prejudices since 1980s, when porn star turned filmmaker Candida Royalle made history by being the first person to produce material in the female voice. Regretfully, they haven’t always received credit for their efforts.
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Despite the increasing number of female pornographers, nominations for the annual XBIZ and AVN Awards—basically the Golden Globes and Oscars of porn, respectively—for Director of the Year have always been dominated by men. Over the previous ten years, women have made up fewer than 20 percent of the nominated directors on average. Thankfully, things are about to change soon.
2019 may turn out to be the year of women in porn, based on the latest nominees. Among the fifteen nominees for XBIZ Director of the Year – Feature, eight are prominent and well-liked women in the field. The same is true for over half of AVN’s best director nominations for 2019. In comparison, Hollywood has only ever nominated five women for the Best Director Oscar, and only one of them has won—Kathryn Bigelow for The Hurt Locker.
Though there aren’t many obstacles for women who want to act in front of the camera, the same can’t be said for those who want to produce and direct (except from the do-it-yourself approach, which allows anybody with a smartphone to shoot porn and sell their own film online). A fairly common—and widely accepted—business model for women is to establish recognition and credibility as performers before branching out into directing and producing. This differs greatly from the typical male trajectory, since many male directors were either never performers or became performers only after the fact.
While Howard Stern referred to author Tristan Taormino as a “porn star,” it would be more accurate to characterize her as a sex educator who began her career as a XXX director by meticulously converting her book, “Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women,” from print to video.
Taormino didn’t enter the industry through the typical methods, and in the late 1990s, he began approaching adult firms with an almost unheard-of idea: women-focused instructional porn. Then, in 2007, Taormino took home the AVN Award for Best Gonzo Film—that is, a film containing sex scenes but no written narrative. “Gonzo had until then mostly been dominated by male directors and male producers, so I was the first woman to win in that category,” Taormino adds. “Up until that point, no woman had gone bonkers.”
Even with the amount of work being created, the following wave of women had to wait eight more years for token nominations before they started to gain much-deserved acclaim. It fluctuates each year, as Taormino noted. Though it’s evolving, at times it seems like a list of guys and one or two women. Since more women are producing original material, parity seems possible.
Bree Mills won both the AVN’s Movie of the Year and the prestigious XBIZ Director of the Year honors last year. Mills’ works are not associated with the usual pretty-but-boring “female” material; rather, they feature some of the more forbidden subjects. When Mills entered the adult film industry, she claims there was a gap in the industry. She says, “The quality had become secondary to pushing traffic and generating impressions.” Her goal has been to “go outside of the traditional porn box,” and that has been her driving force.
In contrast to most male pornographers, who also operate the camera, one-woman crews are somewhat uncommon. Serving as the primary cameraman and a reliable mainstay on set, Mike Quaser is an accomplished experienced director who collaborates with several notable female producers. Quaser believes that as the adult business has expanded in previously unheard-of ways over the past 20 years, it has gotten better the more female directors there are. “There is a lot of pornography directed by stereotypically attractive men, and a lot of it isn’t very good. It’s beneficial to have a female viewpoint, even if it’s a very twisted one; Quaser mentions Bree Mills as one example. “I find it far less creepy than if it were similar content directed by men, for some reason, even though some of the stuff being done for Pure Taboo, which is like her brain child,” the speaker said.
In order to compete with their male counterparts, female directors need to not only avoid stereotypes but also reach a larger audience. Since refocusing her career, actress and director Kayden Kross has managed to become one of the most regularly nominated women filmmakers. Working to fill the gaps and raise the standard, Kross remarks, “The angles were always either gross or disinterested, and the stories were dumb.”
That is not without challenges of its own. “Creating material that appeals to both genders and their tastes is a problem we encounter. According to Kross, heterosexual male filmmakers are solely supposed to appeal to other heterosexual men. “I recall the day I thought I had it perfected after seeing my first edit. I haven’t given up on reaching that peak.
