Candida Royalle: Pioneer in the Trenches of the Feminist Sex Wars

Femme Productions Gave Women’s Desires Voice and Vision

As the Golden Age of Porn began to wane in the mid-1980s, a radical re-envisioning of what explicit sexual entertainment could be was being developed by Candida Royalle, a performer turned entrepreneur. Despite porn-negative Second Wave Feminist claims to the contrary, Royalle believed she could successfully combine her strong feminism with on-camera presentations of women’s desires to both give and receive pleasure. Her goal was to do so in an ethical, professional, labor-focused setting that featured plot-based stories.

"I just think that the work she did. She did it with a passion. She did something that she really believed in. It came from her personal need to be able to explore her own sexuality. I think one of her goals was to feel like she could enjoy sex without feeling guilt, just for the sake of pleasure.”

- Veronica Vera. The friend, author, sex worker, executor of Royalle’s estate, and Wall Street trader turned Manhattan matriarch of Miss Vera’s Finishing School for Boys Who Want to be Girls

Like many women, Royalle came into adulthood with more than her share of trauma. Abandoned at 18-months of age by her mother, she and her sister relied upon their abusive professional jazz drummer father and their violent and emotionally unstable stepmother.

“We all have our old baggage,” Vera observed. “And we all have to deal with it. A lot of the dire excerpts (from Jane Kamensky’s new biography, Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution), were Candice being kind of hard on herself, expressing frustrations. I think a lot of that comes from some very old stuff.”

 

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Kamensky had unique access to Royalle’s archive, personal journals, art, letters, and other items previously stored by the Schlesinger Library after the filmmaker’s death in 2015.

Born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1950, Royalle was a creative woman who had been drawing since she was old enough to hold a pencil and maintaining diaries since the age of 12. She studied art and design in high school and college before she moved to California in 1974, where she used the mediums of film and video to explore her sexuality. Porn, modeling, loops, and escorting paid the bills and let her live the unconventional lifestyle she craved, although some of her experiences were bad enough that a few entries in her copious diaries reveal an occasional desire to take a hiatus.

Before she became one of the first women to move to the other side of the camera, she appeared in about 50 porn films, including Hot and Saucy Pizza Girls, Carnal Heaven, Easy Alice, and Ultra Flesh, which may be examples of what she later referred to as the industry’s “feelingless, mechanical crap.” Her final appearance was in the 1980 release Blue Magic, which she wrote. Presumably, she considered it to be a higher quality of crap.

Royalle married Scandi-porn veteran Per Sjöstedt and moved back to New York City in 1980, where, thanks to Sjöstedt’s father, she was able to become the co-founder of Femme Productions with now-mainstream actress Lauren Neimi in 1984. Her dream was to create “erotica” that was different from the male-gaze obsessed porn that had come before. She wanted her female characters to receive and enjoy sexual pleasure and indulge in post-coital afterglow, not merely go through a series of strange sex positions until their male co-stars ejaculated. Her cameras focused on the faces of her performers during orgasm and found ways to present their bodies and actions without centering on their genitals, which is not to say her six sex scene releases didn’t feature plenty of “meat” shots and blowjobs. As part of her own process of sexual healing and growth, Royalle wanted to use her creativity to help other women and their partners navigate the shifting sexual-political landscape.

Once married, Royalle felt uncomfortable having sex on camera professionally, but once her single status returned, she endeavored to shed inhibitions by disallowing the act of sex and the emotions of the heart from combining and stopping her. Fire Island was a favorite escape, and Vera recalled a night when the two were staying in the same house and met a handsome man. Vera returned to the dwelling, but Royalle remained behind.

“When she came back, she said that he had pleasured her orally. I was surprised. I mean, he was a really nice man but, for me, in order to have sex with somebody I had to have more of a connection or feel that it was going to go somewhere,” Vera reflected. “But for her, she was more like, ‘Yeah, he was horny, and I just felt it would feel really good. It was really great!’ She was proud that she had gotten to this place where she could just let herself enjoy pleasure with no strings. It was almost like allowing this fellow to pleasure the queen.” Trips like this reinforced Royalle’s determination to help other women become the source of their own pleasure and have partners who understood the importance of both giving as well as receiving sexual satisfaction.

During its first year in business, Femme Productions released Femme and Urban Heat, both of which featured performers dolled up in classic 1980s style having sex in such gritty locations as stairwells, freight elevators, rooftops, and un-air-conditioned apartments. In 1986, Royalle took a risk by shooting a two-hour narrative feature called Three Daughters which told the tale of a loving and intact family with three successful sisters who lived in a tasteful house in the New Jersey suburbs.

 

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By featuring foreplay, AIDs-responsive safer sex practices, engaging storylines with context starring sex-positive role models, hiring straight and genuinely bisexual/lesbian performers as well as real-world couples or crushes whenever possible, and women perfectly capable of expressing or discovering what they want, Femme Productions invented the concept of “couples erotica.” To help support the women appearing in adult productions, she and fellow industry legends Veronica Vera, Gloria Leonard, Veronica Hart, and Annie Sprinkle formed Club 90.

The rest of the 80s were filled with awards, favorable mainstream media coverage, adoring fans, accolades from the sexology community, condemnation from anti-porn forces, and presentations before television and academic audiences. No longer merely porno chic, Royalle’s introduction of a woman’s perspective into frankly erotic situations during the height of the so-called “feminist sex wars” meant that the entertainment genre was finally being taken seriously. Whether porn was a threat, or an art form depended on who was talking, something that grew increasingly murky as evangelical Christians and radical feminist writers like Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea Dworkin, and Women Against Pornography joined forces against it.

While the “feminist sex wars” raged, Royalle remained steadfast in her belief that not only was a new style of women and couples-friendly porn necessary, but there was a market for it. It was a market that needed to get used to scenes without facials and box covers without vapid-looking big-boobed blondes, though.

Fortunately for porn, especially feminist-minded porn, not every self-determined woman felt that adult entertainment was intrinsically degrading, dangerous, invariably coercive, and non-consensual. A veteran of both enjoyable and unfortunate experiences as a performer, Royalle hoped to use her background to increase understanding of the options, diminish the perception of sex workers as victims, and discourage those bent on criminalizing porn from following through.

Reviewers were tepid about Femme Productions titles, but the fans were enthusiastic with thousands writing to Royalle for advice, in thanks, and with future video suggestions. This audience response encouraged her to continue to believe that writer-activist Robin Morgan was wrong when she wrote, “Pornography is the theory, and rape the practice” in her book Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist. It was this fierce sense of sexual autonomy that drove her to debate MacKinnon on The Donahue Show and write an angry and ultimately unpublished letter to Ms. Magazine demanding to know why it wanted “nothing to do with a woman who’s been directly associated with the adult film industry unless she has a horror story to tell.” In 1989, she signed onto the sex-positive Post Porn Modernist Manifesto.

Anderson Cooper; Phil Donahue; Morton Downey Jr; Jane Pauley, Dr. Ruth Westheimer, Dateline NBC; The New York Times; Time Magazine; The London Times; Glamour; Marie Claire; the Smithsonian Institute; American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists; American Psychiatric Association national conference; the World Congress on Sexology; and a multitude of universities provided Royalle with opportunities to spread the good word of positive sexuality, shared pleasure, self-determination for women, and her own ascension from “slut-drug addict to politically correct successful entrepreneur spokeswoman.”

Even with all of that cred, Royalle and Femme Productions felt the pain of technological change as the 1990s rolled around. Home-shot amateur porn and the introduction of online content introduced new options for fans while cutting into profits for professionals. In 1992, she became a founding board member of the now-defunct Feminists for Free Expression, and in 1999, the quick-witted businesswoman entered a partnership with Dutch industrial designer Jandirk Groet. Together, Groet and Royalle created the Natural Contours line of discreet and ergonomic personal massagers and kegel exercisers. Like her videos, the toys earned positive reviews and became best-sellers.

 

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How to Tell a Naked Man What to Do, Royalle’s first book was published in paperback in February 2006. Unlike Jenna Jameson’s later autobiography, How to Make Love Like a Porn Star, which earned Jameson $150,000, Royalle’s book struggled to find a publisher and did not contribute much to her bank account once it found one. Simon and Schuster/Fireside ultimately published the book in the U.S. while Piatkus Press brought it to the U.K. The following year, two “ethnic erotica for couples” titles, Afrodite Superstar and Caribbean Heat, were released as part of a new line called Femme Chocolat.

Less busy during her final years, she still maintained an attractive shingled cottage on Long Island where she gardened, entertained friends, advised up-and-coming alt pornographers, and adored her cats. She ate healthily, nurtured herself, and, as was her tradition, made sure everyone knew when her birthday rolled around. “She celebrated her birthday big time, all the time,” Vera, who grew close to Royalle at a baby shower in 1983, shared, “either with a whole bunch of friends or maybe in a smaller way, but October 15 everybody knew it was Candice’s birthday.”

“She became her own family and had a very sweet life at the end,” Vera observed. “She always made time to go to the beach, to Fire Island, with friends. She was so charming and fun that people gravitated toward her.” Even Royalle’s by-then former husband remained close friends with her, and when she became unable to join Club 90 meetings or performances due to her advancing cancer, its members were there to care for her and preserve her legacy.

Throughout her many diaries, Royalle expressed an ongoing quest to understand the nature of love and sex, and how the two relate to one another. Although she occasionally despaired for the future of mainstream porn; many queer, feminist, and alt creatives consider Royalle to be their spiritual godmother. This may be true both literally and figuratively since Vera observed that “She got around, Miss Candice, and she said that she would be back to haunt us. And she does, fortunately. She was unique. One-of-a-kind and a very good friend. Very loyal and wise friend. If you needed counsel, she gave you good counsel.”

Sadly, for feminist porn, women’s rights, free speech, her many friends and fans, and herself, Royalle lost her battle against ovarian cancer on September 5, 2015. She died at home, surrounded by loving friends.