Luna Luna: Talking to Revolutionary Communist Protestors at the NYC Porn Film Festival

Image by Nyssa Frank for the NYC Porn Film Festival

Good news, everyone! I have a new post up on Luna Luna, in which I transcribed the sort-of-funny, sort-of-frustrating, sort-of-fantastic conversation-slash-argument I had with the protestors outside the NYC Porn Film Festival back on February 28.

A niblet:

Lynsey G: I do feel like you’re making a lot of generalizations here about people who make porn, as if they’re all the same. And that’s not true.

Protestor: First of all, fundamentally, to be personal… to be frank… I’m not against sex. Ok, I love sex.

Lynsey G: Awesome.

Protestor: But by definition, I think pornography is about treating… Is about the objectification of people. Sex is a relationship.

Lynsey G: What about porn that’s made by people who are in a relationship, and want to put that on video?

Protestor: But that’s not what defines pornography. I would call that eroticism. There’s a difference between pornography, which comes from “pornographis” which is about concubines, right…

Lynsey G: “Writing about prostitutes” is the Greek translation, I believe.

The protestor I spent most of the time talking to was a smart woman who had some ideas I absolutely agreed with. But I couldn’t agree that making sweeping generalizations about “porn” as a monolithic entity would get us anywhere.

In the end I gave her the name of a queer feminist trans woman who makes documentary porn about the trans experience, and we went our separate ways.

Read the rest at Luna Luna!

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