Image via Cut It Out You Guys.
Thomas Roche has a really good point in his Blowfish column this week: The Feminist Porn Awards, which is a really good thing, made a weird decision this year. Instead of categories, it’s just one big long lump of a list of really incredible indie porn films. This doesn’t help me, as either a reviewer or as a consumer. I *do* want to know which film has the “Hottest Dyke Scene” so I can tell you about it. I’m puzzled, and wish they hadn’t done that. I mean, part of what was cool about it, to me, was that they weren’t doing all those insulting categories like mainstream porn awards do, such as “Best Ethnic Scene”. Thomas writes,
(…) More importantly, from a consumer perspective, the Feminist Porn Awards have consistently honored quality work by independent artists who are changing the field. So don’t mistake my onrushing puzzlement as disregard for what the awards are doing: on the contrary, I think they’re among the most important developments in the porn industry in the last five years.
But this year they’ve both confused and invigorated me, because that big long list of 46 nominees is not divided by category. It’s all just . . . a big long list, one title after the other. Alphabetical, by director first name.
Why’d they make this choice? Says the site: “The Feminist Porn Awards have not separated films according to category, so we can let each film shine on its own merit.” That’s right — no more “Hottest Dyke Sex Scene,” which The Crash Pad took home in 2005, no more “Best Dyke Scene,” which Superfreak nabbed in ‘07; no more “Best Trans Sex Scene,” awarded to In Search of the Wild Kingdom in 2007, or “Hottest Kink Film,” which Bondage Boob Tube got in 2008.
No categories at all! Just a big fat pile of porn, all mingling together in a puppy-pile. I’m utterly floored — blown away. I don’t know what to think. Enriched or outraged? Both, and neither. I have no fucking idea. It’s a dangerous choice that’s got me genuinely confused about where I stand, something that rarely happens in porn.
Clearly one of the things that makes “feminist porn” important is that it breaks down existing categories — between gay and straight, male and female, trans and cisgender, et cetera. But no categories at all? Chemistry 4 right up there “competing” against Doing It Ourselves: The Trans Women Porn Project? I’ll confess that has me simultaneously invigorated and freaked out.
I’ve had this conversation in relation to the Oscars, where, for instance, documentaries don’t win Best Picture even though they theoretically could. The market is dominated by “fiction” films. If documentaries didn’t have their own categories at the Oscars, they would never win anything. The documentary categories guarantee that productions in that category receive fair consideration against others of their same type, rather than having to compete against profoundly different films that are guaranteed to always get more attention. (…read more, blog.blowfish.com)
seriously. I overheard someone in the audience saying, “do we REALLY need this?”
“Best Ethnic-Themed Film – Latin” still has me shaking my head and laughing.