Feminist pornography subverts the dominant gaze – beyond the male gaze
Feminist pornography questions who holds the camera, who writes the scene, and what imagery is produced – for whom. From Club 90 to Erika Lust’s productions, via the post-porn by Valentine aka Fluida Wolf
A speculum, a stage, and a gaze reversed: Annie Sprinkle’s sexual revolution
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 is no longer something to be looked at, but rather, it becomes the point from which the woman looks. That symbolic reversal forces the audience, and with it, 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 to debate. Her call to rethink pornography, from both aesthetic and political perspectives, has since shaped a controversial cultural landscape that spans independent film, queer theory, feminist activism, and, increasingly, digital platforms.
The feminist porn wars: when sexual liberation became a battleground
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 significant 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 not only depicts male domination, but also perpetuates discrimination on a large scale, normalizing inequality and the sexual subordination of women.
According to the anti-porn perspective, sexual liberation did not emancipate women; rather, it masked new forms of oppression within a market built on male desires. 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 and legislative chambers. They even allied with conservative religious groups, thereby contributing to the long-standing division within the women’s movements.
An unexpected counter-response emerged from the margins of the feminist groups in reaction to the anti-porn and anti-sex stance. 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 bodies and pleasure. Through successive iterations, this revolutionary strategy gave rise to what we now call feminist pornography.
Ethical porn vs feminist porn: why the difference actually matters
In public discourse, the terms “ethical porn” and “feminist porn” are often used interchangeably. This overlap has led to misunderstandings that have primarily benefited the mainstream porn industry over the years.
Ethical porn is, first and foremost, a category tied to working conditions. It concerns production aspects such as documented consent, fair compensation, the absence of coercion, transparent distribution processes, and contractual protections for performers. Talking about ethical porn means describing the fairness of the production system. While it addresses the systematic abuses present in the mainstream industry, it does not address the issue of the gaze, the images and aesthetic produced, or the implicit subject of the desire being represented. A film can have impeccable contracts and still use the same visual language as misogynistic mainstream porn.
The central question, then, is not merely whether pornography can be ethical, but for whom it is produced as such. Any attempt at an answer inevitably calls for a clear political positioning that addresses gender, sexuality, representation, and consent in explicit terms. Feminist directors demand a rigorous examination of the narrative framework of pornography: whose perspective shapes it and how bodies are imagined and displayed.
Ethical claims must be tested within this broader representational economy. While productions branded as “feminist” may mark progress in labor conditions, they often leave the underlying architecture of the dominant gaze intact. This discrepancy puts feminism at risk of being used as a mere marketable certification, stripped of its ability to challenge the industry’s sexist logics.
In her manifesto I’m a Pornographer and a Feminist, Swedish filmmaker Erika Lust sets out her vision for ethical, feminist pornography, based on explicit consent, fair working conditions and a representation of desire that is not confined to the dominant male gaze. Through her XConfessions platform, Lust has also demonstrated the existence of an audience interested in alternative forms of pornography in which intimacy, reciprocity and performers’ subjectivity are central.
Similarly, British filmmaker Petra Joy moves in the same direction and openly positions herself within a feminist “counter-cinema” practice. In her film Female Fantasies (2007), she collects real sexual fantasies from women and transforms them into images, bringing desire to the screen from their perspective and distancing it from the visual conventions of mainstream pornography. In this shift in representation, the female viewer becomes the center of the visual composition and overturns the perspective of the entire representation of desire. The gaze is then organized around a subjectivity that actively desires and interprets the erotic moment; while the performers’ bodies are no longer defined by their passive availability to an implied male observer.
Who controls the camera? How the male gaze is built into pornographic language
In Pornotopia (2010), Paul B. Preciado describes porn as a “device” that, over time, constructs an imaginary space based on an implicit viewpoint — male, heteronormative, white, and consumerist — embedded in the very grammar of the images. Through editing, camera angles, and direction, the female body is positioned as the object of a gaze that always belongs to others.
As early as 1975, Laura Mulvey identified a dynamic in classic Hollywood cinema and called it the “male gaze”. In that context, the gaze operates through narrative mediation structured by director, plot, editing, and identification with characters. In pornography, this mediation largely disappears because the naked body is already exposed and arranged for consumption.
In any mainstream, ethical, or feminist pornographic production, the person directing the camera and writing the scene occupies a situated position that effectively defines the pornographic “device” and produces a specific regime of gaze. This gaze, in turn, determines what is desirable and for whom. The difference, then, does not lie in the existence of this gaze, which is always present, but rather in who inhabits it and with what degree of awareness.
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, rimming, and more. These practices are recognized as a dignified and shame-free form of personal exploration because the gaze does not stem from a pre-established hierarchy of desire.
Post-porn as resistance: how queer activism rewrote the language of desire
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 Annie Sprinkle’s aforementioned 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 most significant contributions is Postporno (2020) by Valentine aka Fluida Wolf, a queer performer and activist, who weaves together bodily experience with a critical framework on mainstream pornography. For Fluida Wolf, post-porn is a territory that «eludes categorizations and univocal definitions»; it is a space for experimentation where non-binary identity, decoloniality of the gaze, and performative practice coexist without resolving into a fixed paradigm.
Instead of trying to create better pornographic content within the same misogynistic and hegemonic system, directors and performers can use post-porn as a critical lens to examine who can be the object of desire, who is included in the realm of pleasure, and who is excluded from it. In doing so, they make visible the power hierarchies that organize normative sexuality. Post-porn challenges the relationship between sex and sexuality by overturning the power relationship between subject and object. Fluida Wolf sums it up herself:
«The stated intent of post-pornography is, in short, to unmask the codes of conventional, sexist, racist, and ableist (discriminatory toward people with disabilities) 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.»
42 billion visits a year: what porn consumption data reveals about desire and representation
From the early 2000s to the present day, pornography consumption has established itself as a global mass phenomenon. Pornhub’s “Trends That Defined 2025” report recorded over 42 billion visits per year. Within this traffic, women accounted for approximately 30% of users worldwide, showing steady growth over the past decade.
The data also reveals a qualitative shift in the search for LGBTQ+ content. Terms such as “lesbian strapon” (+62%), “trans threesome” (+67%), and “trans amateur” (+49%) have steadily increased, indicating an audience seeking representations outside the heterosexual norm. The Trans category has become the second most-viewed of the year. However, this growing visibility could also lend itself to forms of rainbow washing, or the commercial appropriation of LGBTQ+ identities driven more by profit than by genuine inclusion. Natassia Dreams, Pornhub’s trans Brand Ambassador, comments positively on the trend:
«What’s happening in 2025 is more than just an increase in views; it’s a cultural shift. For the first time, trans-led content is the second most-watched category in the industry. People are finally seeking out stories and performers who challenge old ideas about gender and sexuality. It’s amazing to see viewers become more open-minded and interested in authenticity. This growth shows that trans creators are finally being seen and celebrated on our own terms. Audiences and the industry are evolving together.» (Source: Pornhub)
Despite its growing audience, the industry’s content continues to show a marked imbalance in pleasure representation. A 2024 study published in Sex Roles: A Journal of Research highlights that male orgasm appears in 78% of the most popular videos, compared to just 18% for female orgasm. These statistics suggest a narrative structure centered on the performance of cisgender, heterosexual men, in which female pleasure is often marginal or subordinate.
Differences also emerge in consumption patterns. About 70% of men aged 18 to 34 report weekly consumption, while consumption levels are lower among women, though still significant, at about 15% to 30%. 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 similar to their own language because it fosters identification, making the erotic experience more relatable.
The gap between supply and demand is significant because there are no comparable quantitative data between mainstream and feminist pornography. 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 actively reshaping how pleasure is represented and which bodies are included.
Who decides what is desirable? Feminist porn, sex education, and the future of erotic imagination
The debate on feminist pornography has long transcended the entertainment industry, extending into visual culture, sex education, universities, museums, and the politics of the body. In the strictest sense, porn is not only a consumer product but it shapes collective erotic imagination and it influences not only what people desire, but also how they desire it, and what they expect from pleasure.
In contexts where public sex education is still largely absent or inadequate, as is the case in Italy, mainstream pornography has filled the void. In effect, it has taught people what sex means, along with all the hierarchies, distortions, and symbolic violence that come with it. In Future Sex (2016), Emily Witt describes these dynamics through a first-person exploration of contemporary desire and the imagery that shapes it.
«If the future was to be defined by a more honest and nuanced sexual culture, one in which sexual diversity was valued, the people with maximalist ambitions were futurists, and they had knowledge unavailable to those who had not considered their extremes. 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.»
Witt seeks to understand what happens when available images are no longer sufficient to contain lived experience, without falling into ideological rhetoric. She asks the same question that feminist porn poses: Who decides what is desirable, and by what right?
While not solving the problem comprehensively, feminist and queer pornography names it, helping to redefine a sexual imagination that is neither puritanical nor consumerist. Recognizing desire as something plural and situated means considering it dependent on the bodies that experience it and not reducible to either a norm or an industrial format that claims to precede it. After all, Annie Sprinkle’s gesture with the speculum showed that the scandal lay in the gaze rather than the body. Today, feminist and queer directors carry forward this lesson in a much larger classroom, expanding both visibility and imagination.
Micaela Flenda
