Candida Royalle, feminist pornographer

[photo by Arthur Cohen]
for the Old Mole Variety Hour October 5, 2015


When I was a child, the women's liberation movement was a vibrant and visible force, but by the late 1970s and early 1980s, the women's movement was fracturing and faltering.  Just as I was starting to navigate for myself some of the currents of adult sexuality, some of the most prominent feminist activists were focused on the dangers of pornography.  Not the church, not the state, not capitalism, but images of naked people having sex were somehow to blame for much of women's oppression.

Thank goodness, then, that the 1980s also saw the emergence of feminist pornography.  Last month one of its most important figures died:  the filmmaker, free-speech advocate, and sex-positive feminist known as Candida Royalle.

As Lily Burana has put it,
 

She was a firebrand of feminist sex crusading long before “sexpert” was a career choice, and founder of Femme Productions, the first successful production company for feminist and couples-oriented erotic films.

Through Femme, [she ] became an instrumental figure in establishing the feminist and couples’ market for adult entertainment, in a time when anti-porn feminism dominated the rhetoric, and even declaring an interest in graphic sexual material would get you branded as a traitor to the cause. . . . [She] built her own template for filmic depiction of sex and her own distribution network to disseminate it. Before Candida and independent porn producers like her, the video business was completely male-dominated, and its distribution channels mob-controlled.

Memorials for her will be held in San Francisco later this month and in New York in November.

To be sure, earlier porno films were not what one might have expected from the descriptions of them offered by groups like Women Against Pornography or the 1986 report of the  Attorney General's Commission (the Meese Report), which marked an alliance between anti-porn feminists like Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin and the socially conservative right wing of the Republican party.

Instead, as anti-censorship feminist film scholar Linda Williams argues in her 1989 book  Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the Frenzy of the Visible,   for instance,   pornography has been one of the few cinematic genres in which women were not regularly punished for being sexually active. 

That doesn't mean those sexually explicit films were not sexist, of course, though it does mean that sexism is more widely shared across genres, including the movie musicals to which Williams suggests porn films are most generically similar--since, among other things, both have narratives interrupted by "numbers."

Laura Mulvey's germinal analysis of "Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema" foregrounded the ways that in classical Hollywood cinema, man is bearer of the look, woman is object of the gaze: women are the ones being seen rather than seeing.  In this analysis, cinematic pleasure is understood as predominantly masculine, and the position of the female spectator is difficult to locate, not just in porn, but in mainstream Hollywood film as well.

In a 1987 interview, Candida Royalle comments that

Women's sexuality has only come to be recognized in the last 20 years. Porn was always for men. Now that women are finally allowed to have a sexuality, we are looking for stimulus. Women are saying, "Okay, now let's look at a film." Well, now is the time to start making films for women. That doesn't just mean quality and scripts. It means what's the sex all about.

Williams argues that a key issue in many of the films released by  Royalle's company, Femme Productions,--and the answer to the question, What's the sex all about?--is, 'how to make a woman the hero-subject of the sexual narrative without making her a victim-hero as well.'

Much of this turns out to be about 'providing better reasons for the sex,' though doing so may not involve much more narrative in between the sexual numbers, but, Williams suggests, can involve a use of real-time sequence, establishing the time, space, and duration of the performance rather than assembling it afterward in the editing.   In addition, Williams points to a tendency toward whole-body rather than fragmented framing,  more in the fluid style of Astaire and Rogers than the separations of Busby Berkeley.  Williams describes this as a "distinct shift from the confessional, voyeuristic mode of much feature-length narrative — . . . . to the performative mode of the jam session — a quality ... of bodies performing pleasurably for each other.”

Many critics, mostly male viewers, found these movies unsexy.  But the films evidently worked for many viewers, who made Femme Productions a  major success in the "couples" market of the VHS era.

Thus, Candida Royalle is mainly remembered by the public for her contributions to the representation and enhancement of female sexual pleasure.

But recent tributes also remind us that she is also remembered, by those who knew her, for her role in communities of feminist sex workers and activists.  And we should note that precisely this embeddedness in community enabled her work and became part of it. In 1983, a number of women performers in porn came together in a consciousness-raising and support group that developed out of conversations begun at a baby shower they held for one of them.  As Club 90, the group of friends opened their meetings to other women in the adult-film industry, and went on to collaborate with the feminist art group Carnival Knowledge, and to produce a theater performance called Deep Inside Porn Stars.  The Club 90 women were also those from whom Candida Royalle recruited directors for Femme Productions.  They remained among her closest friends, and many were with her when she died last month of ovarian cancer.

Born Candice Vadala  in New York in 1950, she was the daughter of a jazz musician, and

she trained and performed in music, dance and art, attending New York’s High School of Art and Design, Parsons School of Design, and the City University of New York, where she was active in the women’s movement of the late ’60’s and early ’70’s. In San Francisco she hooked up with some of the original members of the infamous Cockettes including the late Divine to create avant garde jazz and theater productions. In 1974, looking to finance her unconventional lifestyle, she entered the world of erotica as an actress.

 

When she began performing in the adult industry she had enough of a sense of humor to rename herself for the fungus that causes yeast infections.  Candida Royalle starred in some 25 porn films, and in 1984 she moved behind the camera to begin writing, directing, and producing films, with Femme Productions.
 

In addition to helming Femme Productions, and promoting and encouraging the work of other feminist pernographers,  Royalle was a founding member of Feminists for Free Expression (FFE). She lectured extensively, and in  [In 2004] Royalle authored the book How to Tell a Naked Man What to Do.

[She] was a member of the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists[, and in] 2014, she received a Doctorate in Human Sexuality for her life’s work from the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality.

As a sex-positive activist, Royalle promoted female masturbation, sexual exploration and  "closing the orgasm gap. She showed women what they wanted to see in porn, but she also emphasized applying that knowledge to their own sex lives by being vocal about what they wanted in bed."

In remembrances of her work, feminist friends and fellow pornographers have noted that a common thread in her work was  “a commitment to the principle that women have the right to explore, enjoy and celebrate their sexuality, openly and proudly."