Not-So-Sexy: New NYC Porn Festival Draws Mixed Reactions
Note: many links within this article are NSFW — click at your own risk.
Last weekend was the first annual NYC Porn Film Festival. Curated by Simon Leahy, the event took place over three days at Bushwick’s Secret Project Robot.
Arriving at the festival, the entrance was barely-noticeable, as if it was a little secret club. NYCPFF’s site said the space would become a “42nd street 1980’s cinema experience! With neons, sexy booths, films, and events.” One might expect a dazzlingly seedy visual treat, especially considering the easily transformable Bushwick arts space has traditionally welcomed all sort of installation art. In actuality, it looked vaguely tossed together — posters stuck on walls haphazardly, fabric-cloaked corners featuring computers with Pornhub, and a bare screening room with some benches in it.
“I didn’t really know what to expect but the festival seemed really poorly organized,”attendee and Gallatin junior Gaby Del Valle said. “It sort of seemed like a group of people were just like ‘hey, let’s have a porn festival’ and threw it together in a couple weeks. It just felt like they could’ve done more than they did, especially since they had a corporate sponsorship.”
That particular corporate sponsorship happens to be Pornhub, one of the Internet’s largest ‘tube sites,’ or a place where anyone can access explicit content that would typically cost money for free: basically the YouTube of porn.
Pornhub’s content predominantly reflects the mainstream, heavily featuring white heterosexual models, scenes of female degradation without context, and fetishization of actresses of color and interracial sex. Interesting that an apparently-progressive festival seeking to “challenge the notion of sex according to the proscribed male dominated narrative” aiming on supporting indie artists would link up with Pornhub.
Not only that, but Pornhub parent company MindGeek recently released porn webseries Border Patrol Sex, featuring “American border patrol agents catching undocumented Mexican and Central American immigrant women attempting to cross the border, arresting them, handcuffing them, raping them, and then sending them back to Mexico.” This in itself is questionable enough but when you take into account that 80% of women crossing the border into the US are actually raped during their journey, MindGeek becomes misogynistic and likely racist.
The actual programming of the festival did appear to support its mission statement: full of avant-garde, queer, trans, kink-positive or otherwise experimental and diverse features from documentaries to full-on sex scenes. This led many to feel the mainstream sponsor was okay, if the content wasn’t compromised. Sex writer and festival attendee Lux Alptraum felt “there’s actually something kind of satisfying about knowing that some of Pornhub’s money is going to underwrite a bunch of hipsters watching weird art movies in a Bushwick art space.“ It’s a tricky situation, and while sometimes independent projects must turn to the corporate out of financial need, it’s important to also consider the potentially hypocritical philosophical dissonance of such an association.
NYCPFF’s program says it “partnered with Pornhub as a way to … acknowledge the need for experts with access to a diverse body of work.” NYU Local asked the festival to comment on this sponsorship directly, and they seemed dismissive, replying with the cryptic “You can draw your own conclusions.” While I appreciate their confidence in my ability to make inferences, the lack of transparency and rude tone left a bad taste in my mouth.
Each screening at NYCPFF cost anywhere from $5 to $20, which was not an issue for attendees, as the majority of them sold out. Those not in a screening were confined to a small tentlike space where the bar was, which was appreciated if only for the fact that the outside world was thickly coated with snow.
Not all artists felt the festival was accommodating to them — the festival offered participants passes to their day of the festival, but any other events they had to pay for, something not always financially-feasible for the independent artists the event seemed to cater to. Performance artist and festival participant Lena Marquise had a generally “seamless” experience the day of her screening, but felt “it seem[ed] like a process to reach out to the producers of the festival to request passes for the other days.”
An anonymous independent porn director told Local she submitted multiple films to the fest and heard nothing back, and bemoaned the unorganized nature of the website and staff. The event’s program itself, while listing all screenings and events, was riddled with typos and vague descriptions, including failing to list which content was premiering versus what had been made in the nineties. Marquise also felt the listing of her piece “did little to define it.”
When graphic or non-normative sexual content is described in vague terms, one runs the risk of unintentionally exposing a viewer to triggering content. There was no attempt to specifically preface any of the more intense work, including documentary Graphic Sexual Horror about extreme BDSM site InSex that included footage of an actress’s limits actually being violated onscreen. Del Valle said “I personally wasn’t triggered by anything I saw, but people around me were. I’m sure you could argue that if you’re going to see a horror porn event then you should know what to expect, but that’s not an excuse. Specifically with [Graphic Sexual Horror]. There’s a difference between showing explicit sexual material between consenting adults and showing a woman’s sexual boundaries being violated.”
Some also had issues with the restrictions in place — you have to be 18 to legally watch pornographic material, but had to be 21 to attend the festival due to liquor’s presence. NYU student and pornographic actress Diana Colton expressed disappointment with this, telling Local “it is so important for people, including those from ages 18–20, to encounter porn and sexuality in general in a positive or even neutral setting, so they can determine their own thoughts and feelings on it. And of course, I find it really hypocritical and unfair that a performer could star in one of the featured pieces and not even be able to attend the presentation of that piece.”
NYCPFF, while off to a shaky start, has undoubtedly done one thing: got people talking. However, it’s important for the festival to not only celebrate its successes but own up to things they could’ve done better. If you’re going to talk the progressive porn festival talk, you must also walk the walk.
