If you thought the 2nd Annual NYC Porn Film Festival was going to be little more than a bunch of smut enthusiasts watching dirty movies together, you were only half right. This year's iteration of the fest, which was held at Chemistry Creative in Bushwick, featured both actual porn—ranging from artsy shorts to vintage flicks—as well as live performances, free dildos and butt plugs, discussions about the industry and about sexuality more broadly, and an appearance by New York native and perhaps the most well-known adult film star of all time, Ron Jeremy.
The festival featured camgirls, furries, doms and dommes, virtual reality headsets, stand-up comedians, a James Franco music video (sans Franco himself) and even an intellectual property attorney. Panel speakers included Cindy Gallop, founder of MakeLoveNotPorn.tv; professional dominatrix Mistress Dahlia Rain and her submissive, Kenny; and Daliah Saper, the aforementioned intellectual property attorney whose lecture on the legal hurdles faced by victims of revenge porn was one of festival's highlights.
According to Simon Leahy, who organized the festival, the goal was to "embrace pornography in all forms and examine its societal role, while showcasing new actors, technologies, genres, movements, and trends." Despite Leahy's intentions, porn was by no means the highlight of the festival—especially not the "mainstream" genres that are prominently featured on the homepage of Pornhub, the festival's main sponsor.
In fact, one of the overarching (if unintentional) themes of the festival was an acknowledgement of the porn industry's myriad issues: most notably piracy, poor compensation for performers, exploitation through "revenge porn," and the adult film industry's pervasive misogyny.
(Gaby Del Valle/Gothamist)
Rae Sanni, one of the stand-up comedians who performed as part of the "Iron Lady" set, focused her bit on the difficulty of finding porn that suits her sexual needs. "I have a really weird fetish," she said. "It's women being treated well."
"We aren't anti-porn, because the issue isn't porn," explained Cindy Gallop during her panel, "The Social Sex Revolution," which promoted her website MakeLoveNotPorn.tv. "The issue is that we don't talk about sex in the real world." Gallop's website, however, is a direct challenge to most porn sites and streaming services: instead of professional (or even amateur) porn, MLNP hosts videos of everyday couples having what Gallop calls #realworldsex without gimmicks, professional lighting, or hair and makeup teams. Viewers can log onto MLNP and rent the videos posted by real-world couples, who in exchange receive financial compensation for their uploads.
Gallop and her co-panelists, MLNP curators and community managers Sarah Beall and Ariel Martinez, did highlight some issues with the porn industry, including the fact that porn actors are paid by scene and never receive residuals, regardless of how many times their films are purchased or streamed on websites like Pornhub. MLNP's main focus, though, is creating a community where members understand the difference between real-world sex and porn-sex; their tagline is "pro-sex, pro-porn, pro-knowing the difference."
During the MLNP panel, curator Sarah Beall asked: "Who knows better than how constructed and performative porn can be than the people who actually work in it?" Her sentiments were echoed the following day during a Q&A session with Ron Jeremy during which an audience member—who described himself as being a "huge fan"—asked the porn star for romantic advice.
"I work at a coffee shop, and there's a girl who always comes in and she's really hot," the question began. "I'd really like to cream her coffee. But I've never talked to her."
Jeremy's response? "I would suggest not being too aggressive so quickly. Just be yourself and be nice. Say, 'Listen, I think you're very sweet. Would you like to have a drink with me some day?'" Not exactly what you'd expect from someone who has starred in over 2,000 pornographic films.
(Gaby Del Valle/Gothamist)
But even Ron Jeremy's panel—titled The Golden Age of Porn, a retrospective on the way the industry has changed over the past four decades—suffered from the festival's biggest problem: a lack of organization from the top-down. It was intended to be a discussion of the industry's 1970s heyday followed by a brief screening of Joy, a film about a woman who gets raped and begins to enjoy it, causing her to go out and rape men throughout New York City.
Although Ron Jeremy and his co-panelist Gerry Visco briefly talked about porn's declining artistic value, there was little discussion of sexism in the industry, which was the focus of so many of the other discussions. Despite the '70s reputation as the "Golden Age," both Jeremy and Visco talked at length about performers who had died from drug overdoses during that time.
They were confused about how long they were supposed to talk for or when the screening was supposed to begin. Organizers and assistants regularly walked on and offstage and the panel ended up running thirty minutes over time. During an interview with Gothamist, Jeremy described the festival as "a little disorganized, but nice."
Overall, the Porn Film Festival's organizers' desire for shock and awe eclipsed their organizational skills, resulting in an underwhelming and confusing experience for audience members and panelists alike. Although the screenings and lectures were interesting enough, they didn't bring anything new to the table—we've all heard about furries and femdoms before. The intent was clearly to highlight various aspects and perspectives from the adult film industry, but the result was a festival rife with contradictions instead of nuances.
