New feature: She gives me fever

Porn: one of the most controversial subjects of feminist debate. To be honest, many feminists I know are so bored of retreading the same arguments that they shy away from the topic altogether.

Last month Lisa wrote for us from the anti-porn, pro-sex perspective:

Just please accept that not everyone wants to see it. It’s not dirty, it’s just rubbish.

But Annie Sprinkle famously said:

The answer to bad porn isn’t no porn. It’s to make better porn.

We just posted an interview by Sophie Mayer with the director of a collection of short films, meant to be explicitly feminist, called Dirty Diaries which attempts to prove Sprinkle right and the genre isn’t intrinsically or exclusively made up of exploitative rubbish. The queer feminist film festival organisers Club des Femmes have organised a screening of Dirty Diaries tonight.

Mia Engberg, a film director and the curator of this programme of shorts, has this to say about her personal views on this fraught conundrum:

I’ve been in the feminist movement since the late 1980s. At [the] start we were very anti-porn, smashing the windows of pornshops. When queer feminism entered the scene in the 1990s in Sweden, we became much more sex-positive and it was possible to make our own porn. Since I have seen both ‘sides’ I can say we are much stronger now when we can produce things we actually like, and say yes to what we like and not only no to what we don’t like.

Read the whole thing here

Image is a still from one of the shorts in the programme, Dildoman