Feminist pornography: subverting the dominant gaze
Maja Malou Lyse bought the Marilyn Monroe nude that hung in the Playboy Mansion: the Danish artist on who owns an image of a body, from Annie Sprinkle to the feminist pornography debate
Annie Sprinkle, 1990: the speculum that turned the audience into the object
It is 1990, New York City. Annie Sprinkle sits naked on the edge of a stage with her legs spread and a speculum in her hand. She invites one person at a time from the audience to come closer and look at her uterine cervix. The show is called Post Porn Modernist. Reactions range from embarrassment to curiosity. Sprinkle has no intention of provoking for the sake of it.
In that moment the female body ceases to be the object of the dominant gaze and becomes its source. Her vagina becomes the point from which the woman looks, rather than something to be looked at. That symbolic reversal forces the audience, and anyone watching today, to confront their own way of standing before an arousing body and the person who embodies it.
Thirty-five years later, the argument Sprinkle put forward that evening remains open. Her call to rethink pornography, from both aesthetic and political perspectives, has since shaped a contested cultural landscape that spans independent film, queer theory, feminist activism and digital platforms. The legacy resurfaces in the work of the Danish artist Maja Malou Lyse (1993), whose practice sits at the intersection of pornography, biotechnology, desire and visual culture. Referred to as «the feminist of the fourth wave of Danish art», she made her debut in 2019 as the host of Sex Med Maja on national television, tackling many of the same taboos. She represented Denmark at the Venice Biennale 2026.
The Feminist Sex Wars: Dworkin, MacKinnon and the founding of Club 90
To understand what feminist pornography is, we must first understand what it is not, and what it was born in opposition to. Between the 1970s and 1980s, a portion of white American feminism viewed pornography as an instrument of violence against women. Activists such as Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon argued that pornography depicts male domination and perpetuates discrimination on a large scale.
According to the anti-porn perspective, sexual liberation masked new forms of oppression. Using images of the female body for arousal was seen as an act of violence and cultural commodification rooted in patriarchal sexuality. Organizations such as Women Against Pornography brought these issues into the political arena.
In 1983 a group of sex workers and performers, including Veronica Hart, Candida Royalle and Gloria Leonard, began advocating for a different vision: transforming porn from within. They founded the Club 90 collective on Lexington Avenue in New York City, with Annie Sprinkle among its founders, and set out to produce content reflecting performer autonomy and less stereotypical, objectified representations of pleasure. It gave rise to what we now call feminist pornography.
The conflict between opponents and supporters of pornography has persisted through the forty years since the Feminist Sex Wars. Maja Malou Lyse describes herself as critical of sex rather than sex-positive:
«A lot of complexity gets lost when sexuality has to be approached from either a positive or negative position. Addressing matters with more neutrality doesn’t demand that sex be either emancipatory or oppressive; it leaves room instead for pleasure and harm, agency and exploitation, fascination and criticism to exist simultaneously. Several truths usually coexist, even when they contradict each other.»
«Sexual optimism can become another set of expectations. We’re supposed to be free, fulfilled, orgasmic. Sex becomes something to optimize, another measure of whether we’re succeeding as people. Very few people experience sex that straightforwardly. Desire is complicated, sex is complicated.» Such skepticism toward simplifying labels applies to the relationship between pornography and its market. The question of who holds the power of the gaze is linked to the question of who controls the image once it has been produced.
Mulvey, Preciado, and the Marilyn Monroe nude Hugh Hefner kept on his wall
Directors such as Erika Lust and Petra Joy highlight unconventional bodies, diverse ages, and fluid sexual orientations and gender identities without objectifying them. In their productions they depict both simple sexual practices and those considered taboo, including pegging, fisting, BDSM and rimming. These practices are recognized as a dignified and shame-free form of personal exploration, because the gaze stems from something other than a pre-established hierarchy of desire.
Maja Malou Lyse addresses the argument in her work MM (2024), reflecting on the effects, within media history, of the Marilyn Monroe nude that appeared, without her consent, in the first issue of Playboy in 1953. During an auction of the assets of the Playboy Mansion, Maja Malou Lyse found the personal copy Hugh Hefner kept of that photograph, the one that had hung inside the mansion until his death. She recalls the moment she acquired it:
«I knew I had to buy it. In an ocean of replicas, I wasn’t just buying a framed edition of Marilyn’s nude – I was buying Hugh Hefner’s gaze. I did have the possibility of appropriating the object and placing it in a different context: from what could perhaps be understood as an early example of revenge porn, to the Playboy Mansion, to a readymade in an art institution. I wanted to look at a piece of popular imagery that shaped the sexual culture we live in today. This photograph is a prehistory of contemporary visual culture and all its complications around sex, ownership and images.
The question of ownership becomes even more complicated with AI. Today, an image of your body can be produced without your body ever having participated at all. In that sense, the gap between having a body and having control over its image has become much greater.»
Post-porn from Wink van Kempen to Fluida Wolf: unmasking the codes of the image
Feminist porn draws part of its critical vocabulary from post-porn, a phenomenon that emerged at the intersection of performance art, queer activism and forms of bodily experimentation developed outside the sex industry. The term was coined by the Dutch artist and photographer Wink van Kempen in 1990, for the Annie Sprinkle performance Post Porn Modernist, marking an early attempt to reclaim and reframe pornographic language as a site of critical and artistic inquiry.
In Italy, one of the contributions is Postporno (2020) by Valentine aka Fluida Wolf: «The stated intent of post-pornography is to unmask the codes of conventional, sexist, racist, and ableist pornography and to subvert it, by sexualizing the public sphere and giving a voice and sexual dignity to all those subjects excluded, marginalized, and humiliated by it.»
Maja Malou Lyse: «Representing something isn’t the same as endorsing it. I’ve always been occupied with the female body and sexuality. When my mom gave me a camera when I was 16, I turned it towards myself and posted the pictures on Tumblr, without any knowledge of feminist art traditions. I didn’t even know who Cindy Sherman was. Using myself came before I had a theoretical language for it. I still place myself in the work when it makes sense. I don’t want to separate myself from the subject, which art so often does, pointing at the world from a safe distance. I’m already part of the image culture I’m examining; whether I put myself in the work or not, there is no clean position outside of it.»
42 billion visits a year: 78 percent male orgasm, 18 percent female
From the early 2000s to the present, pornography consumption has established itself as a global mass phenomenon. The Pornhub report Trends That Defined 2025 recorded over 42 billion visits per year. Within that traffic, women accounted for around 30 percent of users worldwide, showing steady growth over the past decade. The data reveals a qualitative shift in the search for LGBTQ+ content. Terms such as lesbian strapon (+62 percent), trans threesome (+67 percent) and trans amateur (+49 percent) have increased, indicating an audience seeking representations outside the heterosexual norm. That growing visibility could also lend itself to forms of rainbow washing, the commercial appropriation of LGBTQ+ identities driven by profit rather than inclusion.
Despite its growing audience, the content of the industry shows an imbalance in the representation of pleasure. A 2024 study published in Sex Roles: A Journal of Research highlights that male orgasm appears in 78 percent of the most popular videos, against 18 percent for female orgasm. Those figures suggest a narrative structure centered on the performance of cisgender, heterosexual men, in which female pleasure remains marginal or subordinate.
Differences also emerge in consumption patterns. Around 70 percent of men aged 18 to 34 report weekly consumption, while levels among women run lower, at 15 to 30 percent. According to research from the Journal of Sex Research, women tend to be more selective about the themes and narratives they consume and prefer content close to their own language, because it fosters identification and makes the erotic experience more relatable.
The gap between supply and demand matters because comparable quantitative data between mainstream and feminist pornography do not exist. Independent and feminist platforms remain fragmented and under-researched, which exposes a rift between the standardized, commercial industry and a growing constellation of experimental practices that are reshaping how pleasure is represented and which bodies are included.
Who decides what is desirable: pornography as sex education where sex education is absent
Porn is a consumer product, and it shapes collective erotic imagination: it influences what people desire, how they desire it, and what they expect from pleasure. In contexts where public sex education remains absent or inadequate, mainstream pornography has filled the void. It has taught people what sex means, along with the hierarchies, distortions and symbolic violence that come with it. In Future Sex (2016), Emily Witt says «A better sexuality, if such a thing were possible, would be discovered by people who explored the widest range of sexual practice, not those who treated it as resistant to literal representation.»
Maja Malou Lyse observes: «What matters is the authority the pornographic image suddenly gains — something usually treated as disposable, shameful or simply bad. In the logic of the work, the pornographic image, tied to the hyperfeminine, becomes useful.»
Micaela Flenda
