WARNING: This page contains movie stills that are sexually explicit and so which may be Not Safe For Work.
Well, that’s a good question, and it’s not a question that has a simple answer. It doesn’t mean that porn has to be romantic or gentle or not contain certain kinds of sexual acts. I’m reasonably certain that any sexual act can be presented in a way that is ‘better’ and that any sexual act can be presented in a way that’s ‘worse’.
A good example, because it’s so much discussed, is ‘rough’ sex: Sex that involves things like choking, slapping, spanking, hair pulling, name calling, and the like. In my view, the problem with a lot of mainstream porn isn’t just that it shows these things. It’s that it presents them as ‘normative’, as simply part of what heterosex typically involves, and so as not needing any ‘special’ consent. (See this piece by Violet Blue.) It’s possible to present that kind of sex in an appropriate context, so that it’s clear that it’s something these particular people enjoy and want to be doing. The usual example is Tristan Taormino’s Rough Sex series of films (which I discuss in this paper). Taormino frames the sex scenes with interviews with the participants, in which they talk about why they like that kind of sex—which many people do. (See e.g. this study.)
Presenting sex that way means (at least) presenting the people involved as three-dimensional beings with their own desires and interests. One way to think of this would lead to an emphasis on ‘authenticity’, which is indeed quite common among feminist pornographers. (See e.g. this paper.) But it’s important to remember that the ‘people involved’ might not be the actors themselves but that the characters they are playing. (See this paper.) In the latter case, ‘authenticity’ will not be quite the right notion, but there will be something analogous. Here, one wants the performance to be convincing, even if it isn’t ‘authentic’.
The other important factor, to my mind, is how the sex itself is photographed. It’s at this sort of point that it’s tempting to talk about the ‘male gaze’, but that term has been abused to the point of being meaningless. But it’s still suggestive. In most mainstream porn, what the camera shows us is what a stereotypical porn-watching man would want to see. So the focus is almost entirely on the woman, with the worst example of such shots being so-called ‘point of view’ shots. So you get a lot of shots like these:
(All taken from Hall Pass, which is very much not the best film that Jacky St James has made.) Men appear, as someone once put it, essentially as disembodied penises. Relatedly, there tend to be a lot of genital closeups: what Linda Williams, in Hard Core, calls “meat shots”.
In ‘better’ porn, both these problems are rectified. It’s not so much that we see more of the man—his face and reactions, for example—as that we see more of the couple and they way they interact, which requires showing more of him.
Sometimes, the most effective shot, as in the first shot above, isn’t really sexually explicit at all. What makes the last scene in Torn (commentary here), from which that shot is taken, so powerful is what it means Mimi and Drew, and the scene is photographed in such a way as to highlight the intensity of their connection.
Sex in ‘better’ porn isn’t presented as something men do to women (as Catharine MacKinnon famously put it) but as something that people do together. Of course, that focuses on partnered sex. But even if it’s just one person having sex by themselves, that can be presented as a performance for an audience or as something they are doing for their own pleasure; as something a person is doing, or as something happening to body parts.
The truth, though, is that this website is part of an effort to understand what makes for ‘better’ porn. To borrow a phrase, I know it when I see it, and then I can try to figure out what makes it ‘better’, what makes it ‘different’.