The Naked Feminist

Director: Louisa Achille
Featuring: Veronica Hart, Nina Hartley, Christi Lake, Chloe Nicole, Candida Royalle, Annie Sprinkle, Ginger Lynn, Marilyn Chambers, Seymore Butts, Betty Dodson, Veronica Vega, Mischa Allen, Abby Ehmann, Kylie Ireland, Sharon Mitchell

Review by: Gram Ponante

Aussie filmmaker Louisa Achille did something wonderful and revolutionary with this movie: she was able to present anti-porn feminists in a way that didn't make them seem shrill while giving a podium to some of the adult industry's most levelheaded and articulate champions, particularly Veronica Hart, Nina Hartley, Betty Dodson, Carol Queen, Sharon Mitchell, Annie Sprinkle, Candida Royalle, and Kylie Ireland.

Despite the widening blur dividing porn from mainstream entertainment, docs about the adult industry tend to lionize one side while demonizing the other. Unfortunately, this does nothing to convince the choir of the other's point of view. "Naked Feminist," while clearly pro-porn, neither paints porn's detractors as ridiculous nor shies away from showing porn stars exhibiting doubt.

Shot in 2002 and 2003, "The Naked Feminist" makes the obligatory AVN convention trip to Las Vegas for interviews with Hartley, Julie Meadows, Ginger Lynn, and the one of a kind Chloe Nicole, tracks down Veronica Hart at her office at the late, lamented VCA Pictures (VCA and Adam & Eve seemed to have a lock on the porn talent and clips presented), and found Dodson, Sprinkle, and Queen elsewhere around the country.

Seymore Butts appears briefly, but the remainder of the dozens of interviews are with women, who discuss everything from how porn affects relationships to the notion of solidarity among female performers (the doc devotes a chapter to "Club 90," a support group for porn actresses). We also hear some scary stories (Sharon Mitchell's rape by a crazed fan, Veronica Hart's first scene, in which the director went too far), some unsurprising ones (Chloe was high in her first scene), and a standard issue Dodson heartwarmer, in which she explains to her electrician why his unsatisfied girlfriend left him.

Of all the quotes that illuminate the ambivalence of attitudes about porn, my favorite is Carol Queen's:

"The notion that a woman who revels in her sexuality is free and open to anyone is really the toxic heart of the slut role or epithet and it's the part that the conservative feminists - and we - agree is problematic and wrong and needs to be trained out of the culture," Queen says. "And the culture is reluctant to do that because that is what keeps the slut role dangerous."

"Naked Feminist" has not found wide distribution,so its debut this week on iTunes (rent it for $2.99) will be the best opportunity the hour-long movie has had to attract eyeballs since its release.

Since so much time has passed, however, the new-porn aspirations of interviewees have either already come to fruition and just as quickly become something else - How is Hart's feminism different from Joanna Angel's, which might itself be different from Sasha Grey's? - or faded altogether. Hart is no longer making porn movies, which is a shame (luckily, Candida Royalle is), Chloe is no longer in the business, Marilyn Chambers is dead, and Annabelle Chong's hope that the solo-woman Internet site as a ticket to financial security might have been true in 2003, but is not now.

That said, "Naked Feminist" provides generous dollops of all the women in the adult industry who have something to say about it (circa 2003) and the message is still a compelling one today.

· "The Naked Feminist" on iTunes (itunes.com)

As opposed to the NY Times' reasonably sane and balanced coverage of the adult industry lately, the LA Daily News' new week-long "Valley Exposed" series reads more like a lurid tabloid exposé than Serious Journalism, what with all those words like "secret" and "hidden" and "underground" buzzing around the first couple of paragraphs. AVN takes the writers to task for the article's inaccurasies and barely restrained hysteria, and while we in turn take issue with some of AVN's assertions (we think "several years ago" is perfectly acceptable in describing the time frame of Jenna Jameson's stint on the best seller list), we too are getting a little tired of sloppily researched mainstream porn coverage designed more to titillate suburban readerships than shed any real light on the adult industry. Then again, the series also includes an interesting sidebar on TightFit Productions' Oren Cohen and a (similarly dire yet informative) report today on Sharon Mitchell's Adult Industry Medical Health Care Foundation and the porn business' HIV concerns. So maybe we'll keep tuning in for the rest of the week after all.

· "Exposed: Porn In The Valley": Part I: "The Valley's Dark Secret" and Part II: "Porn And Health" (dailynews.com)
· "News Analysis: Porn Valley's Newspaper Gets Some Porn Stuff Right ... And A Bunch Wrong" (avn.com)

Previously: NY Times: Porn Economy Just As Bad As The Regular One, Deep Inside Kink Dot Com: Smut With A Smile, BBC Goes To Porn Valley, Porn on Pause @ NYT, HIV, Porn and Privacy