Porn Set Women Up From the Start
The Starz comedy Minx and the recent podcast Stiffed illustrate the difficulty of commodifying what women want.
Late last year, when the streaming platform formerly known as HBO Max announced the abrupt cancellation of Minx a week before Season 2 finished filming, the news struck me as grimly ironic. Minx, created by Ellen Rapoport, is a buoyant, ’70s-set comedy about the first feminist porn magazine, loosely based on the real-life publications Playgirl and Viva. It’s a sweet, funny, shrewd show that also features plenty of full-frontal male nudity. The effect is hard to categorize; Minx isn’t “raunchy” or “smutty” or “filthy” or even “risqué.” Unlike Euphoria or The Idol, it’s not interested in hollow provocation. And the penises that proliferate on-screen aren’t there to titillate, exactly, although a montage in the first episode brings to mind what the French film theorist Jean-Louis Comolli once described as “the frenzy of the visible.” If anything, the show’s insistent focus on male nudity feels impertinent, as though we’re all participating in a ritual desanctification of dicks. The show’s clever inversion of subject and object makes erotica seem faintly absurd: Here are men’s bodies exposed for us to look at. Take away the novelty aspect, and what’s left? What does the act of looking actually make us feel?
Minx is about Joyce (played by Ophelia Lovibond), a buttoned-up Vassar grad toiling away at a teen magazine while dreaming of securing funding for her austere second-wave-feminist publication, The Matriarchy Awakens. Her side project is the antithesis of sexy. (“Why is she so angry?” a bewildered executive asks, looking at Joyce’s cover subject, a frizzled activist, mouth agape, raising a fist.) But at a pitch conference, Joyce meets Doug (Jake Johnson, pulling off genial scuzzbucket as only he can), the publisher of a stable of pornographic magazines with titles such as Milky Moms and Feet Feet Feet. Doug is venal but smart; he senses a sea change in the sexual landscape—and an opportunity. To get people to pay attention, he tells Joyce, “You gotta hide the medicine. It’s like, when you give a pill to a dog, you dip it in peanut butter first.” The medicine, in case it isn’t totally clear, is radical feminist ideas, housed within a magazine the pair name Minx. The peanut butter? Naked men.
The question the show asks isn’t whether the two creators will successfully collaborate—their odd-couple, non-romantic chemistry is far too good not to. It’s whether sex can be used to successfully sell anything other than sex itself. Minx is a sly analysis of the tension between creative vision and commercial compromise, which makes its graceless cancellation feel even more pointed, although the second season was rescued by Starz, and premieres this week. The joy of Season 1, for me, lay in the show’s unabashed championing of pleasure, its irreverent sense of humor, its allusions to fault lines in feminist history. But most interesting was how Minx, like the fictional magazine it was examining, wasn’t just sandwiching subversive ideas together with sexual imagery. It was creating a dialogue between the two. For her first photoshoot, Joyce places her centerfold model, an adorable dodo named Shane, in the middle of a construction site, wearing nothing but a toolbelt, while three snarling women in power suits heckle him from the street. “It’s the ability to look,” Joyce concludes. “It makes a woman feel powerful.”
But is feeling powerful enough? Stiffed, a recent podcast from the writer Jennifer Romolini, charts the history of Viva, the visionary feminist erotic magazine that helped inspire Minx, and that published Simone de Beauvoir, Lorraine O’Grady, and Erica Jong next to soft-focus images of naked men. At its best, Romolini argues, Viva managed to be a “bridge between feminism, activism, sexuality, and groundbreaking journalism.” And yet, as the fact that you may very well have never heard of Viva attests, the magazine failed. It failed because its publisher, the Penthouse founder Bob Guccione, presumed to know what women wanted to see without actually endeavoring to find out. It failed because sexual representation, for women, particularly straight women, has always been a bind—our desires are often informed by the same chauvinistic terrain we’re trying to transcend. Both Minx and Viva make one thing clear: Men have set the parameters of porn since the beginning.
Minx is set roughly around 1972, at the beginning of a moment that The New York Times crowned “porno chic,” noting the prominence in popular culture of a feature-length porn film titled Deep Throat. Early in the show’s new season, Joyce and Doug host the West Coast premiere of the movie, but keep hitting roadblocks: Feminist anti-porn campaigners are picketing outside, there’s a streaker on the red carpet, and someone has replaced the projectionist’s reel with the family film Bedknobs and Broomsticks. (Cue a joke about Angela Lansbury that I can’t repeat.) Joyce, edgy and uncertain about the whole thing, runs into Joan Didion in the bathroom, who helps Joyce contextualize her feelings about a hard-core movie being so ceremoniously vaulted into the mainstream. “Doesn’t it feel like people are longing for a way to be more open about sexuality without asking questions?” she asks Joan. She eventually pulls together an editor’s letter for Minx titled “Why I Hated Deep Throat—And Why It’s Good for America.”
The episode is indicative of my issues with Season 2: The show is glib where it used to be thoughtful, evasive about the exploitative edges of the business it’s portraying, and seemingly more interested in staging a quippy ’70s costume party than engaging with the mission of the magazine at its center. Because as an object lesson in sexual representation on film, nothing is more loaded, or more fascinating, than Deep Throat. For the first time, hard-core pornography came packaged in the recognizable narrative structure of a movie, with dialogue and a plot and a heroine’s journey. Not to mention that Deep Throat was funny, in a disarming, slapstick kind of way. It was sleazy, but not sinister. It made sex on-screen seem accessible to people who would never have been seen dead on 42nd Street.
More crucial, though, Deep Throat pulled off a confidence trick in plain sight: It disguised male fantasy as female empowerment. The movie’s premise is that its central character (played by Linda Lovelace) has never had an orgasm and is left unsatisfied by conventional sexual encounters. When she consults a doctor, he informs her that her clitoris is actually located in the very back of her throat, meaning that only extremely committed fellatio will satisfy her. “Though it was touted as a celebration of female sexuality, Deep Throat can be seen as a study in the male control of female sexuality,” a Wall Street Journal retrospective concluded in 2013. Lovelace later wrote in her memoir that she’d been violently coerced into performing in the movie. Before any of this, though, the movie was enshrined as one of the defining cultural spectacles of the sexual revolution. Martin Scorsese saw Deep Throat. So did Spiro Agnew—reportedly at Frank Sinatra’s house—and Jackie Kennedy. (In the show, Joyce name-checks the stars present at the premiere: “Warren Beatty, Alans Arkin and Alda.”)
If the “joke” of Deep Throat was that it told women they could be most gratified and most liberated while on their knees, the prevailing message of the era for men was that objectification could be damaging. That year, Burt Reynolds posed nude for Cosmopolitan, resplendently hirsute—with a strategically placed arm—on a bearskin rug. The caption accompanying the image stated frankly that women’s “visual appetites,” while equal to men’s, had long been neglected, and that Cosmo was trying to redress the balance. The magazine sold out (Minx’s first episode takes some pleasure in showing women reading it openly in the workplace). But Reynolds came to regret the shoot, calling it “a total fiasco” in his autobiography and lamenting that it prevented people from taking him seriously as an actor. Still, the image was trailblazing: Prior to the 1960s, as the author Nancy Friday writes in Women on Top, women weren’t even acknowledged to have sexual fantasies, let alone take pleasure in the sexualized image of a male body.
Viva’s mission, as Romolini explains on Stiffed, was to capitalize on this moment of flux. There was space for a magazine, everyone involved believed, that would acknowledge women as sexual beings (with high-quality erotic photography) while gratifying their political impulses with articles about the work-life balance, sexual liberation, and the case for not having children. The major hurdle, at least at first, was Guccione, who was progressive about sex and about promoting women in the workplace, but limited by his own sexual imagination: Viva’s first issue featured mostly images of naked women in the Penthouse mode, along with articles by exclusively male writers including Norman Mailer. “I don’t think [Bob] gave a moment’s thought to what women wanted or needed,” one former Viva staffer tells Romolini.
Later, when Guccione conceded to demands—including from the woman who would become his wife, Kathy Keeton, whom he hired as editor—and started publishing pictures of naked men, things somehow only got more confounding. Advertisers fled; writers balked at having their bylines next to hazy, Vaseline-clouded photos of male genitalia. Perhaps most complicated, though, was the question of how to conceive of erotic images that would appeal to women. “It wasn’t terribly nuanced—they could’ve done better with the male nudes, made them more attractive from a woman’s point of view,” the former Viva staffer Annie Gottlieb explained in an oral history of Viva from 2018. “I thought they were funny, actually. They [seemed like] a man’s attempt to imagine what a woman would like to look at. But, I mean, I’ve seen a penis before. If I turned the page and there was one, I would shrug and turn [to] the next page.”
Fifty years later, we still haven’t quite figured out how to honestly appraise female desire in mainstream culture—to cater to it in a way that isn’t blurred by what men want to see. The commodification of sex-as-porn is part of the problem—think of the proliferation of the term the money shot, with its presumed primacy of the male orgasm. Although plenty of visionary women are making feminist porn, their work is typically paywalled, limiting their influence compared with the tsunami of violent, misogynist content that anyone, anywhere, can see for free in a given day. “Flesh comes to us out of history; so does the repression and taboo that governs our experience of flesh,” Angela Carter writes in The Sadeian Woman. Sexuality, she concludes, “is never expressed in a vacuum.” In her TEDx Talk, the feminist filmmaker Erika Lust recalls the moment that she realized what porn largely is—a discourse about sexuality where “the only ones participating in the discourse … are men.” It’s not enough, as Viva learned, to simply invert subject and object and assume straight women will respond. There is power in looking, it’s true. But there’s more in getting to decide for ourselves what we want to be revealed, and what we want to reveal in turn.
This is in no small part why Minx’s abandonment of the ideas that made Season 1 so distinctive—the way it interrogated how to sell feminism while honoring the amorphousness of female desire—feels so disappointing. Watching The Idol recently (for my sins), I was struck by how old-fashioned it felt; how in thrall to Deep Throat’s message that what women really crave, even if they don’t know it, is degradation. Is this what Max canceled Minx for? In the final episode of Stiffed, the media consultant and sexual-equality advocate Cindy Gallop tells Romolini that “any industry that is male-dominated at the top inevitably produces output that is objectifying and offensive and objectionable to women.” More frustrating, though, is what Gallop concludes about the landscape of pornography and erotica, half a century after Viva, Deep Throat, and Burt Reynolds on that bearskin rug: that women have never been allowed to explore human sexuality through their own lens, free of external influences or commercial pressures or repression. Where might we be if we had?
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