Based on an in-depth investigation, Mathieu Trachman reveals that heterosexual pornography is a job with differentiated demands for the actors and actresses who engage in it. Taking up the imperative of authenticity of contemporary capitalism, pornographic work, although it creates hierarchies, is nonetheless the site of a form of production.
Before entering into the body of Mathieu Trachman’s book, it is immediately necessary to underline the intellectual audacity, the sociological imagination and the distanced involvement which he had to demonstrate in order to carry out an investigation, within the framework of a thesis, on this obscure and stigmatized object of pornographic work. The production of pornographic films is in fact, as he recounts in his first historical chapter, an activity condemned by the State and by the world of cinema from the mid-1970s. To break with censorship, the government of Giscard and his Minister of Culture, Michel Guy, set up, by a decree and articles of a law of 1975, a commission of the National Center of Cinematography, which classifies films in X, referring them to a closed distribution circuit, according to criteria, the most important of which would be that of masturbatory use considered as “ a perverse practice » (p. 35). With the creation of this ghetto, the professional group of pornographers emerged, which claimed the commercial activity of responding to a demand: that of fantasies “ effective », which are limited here to those of heterosexual men. Women are largely excluded as consumers and gay fantasies belong to a specific market.
A bold method
To get around the difficulty of accessing official and precise statistics, Mathieu Trachman chose to focus on the internal borders and the trajectories of men and women evolving in this French pornographic industry. A review of the reviews of 1400 films in the magazine Hot Video, from 1989 to 2001, more than seventy interviews, sometimes repeated, with producers, directors, production technicians, critics, actors and actresses as well as observations of filming, allowed him to draw the contours of a small world dominated by an elite of a few majors » or integrated professionals (broadcast on canal +) and a large number of precarious people, with low financial profits and uncertain professionalism (chapter 2). These directors, most often self-taught, sometimes former actors, from qualified and precarious middle classes, recruit and (poorly) pay actors and actresses on flexible performer contracts, impose their scripts, produce with small budgets (less than 10,000 euros) many films. The social, professional, sexual and family trajectories of each are hierarchical or intersect in a certain blurring of boundaries, the world of pornography being described by many as a “ family “. The blurring particularly concerns the border between amateurs and professionals, which we find in the worlds of art, music, theater or the visual arts. The border with the intimate world or private, gratuitous practices of sexuality is also disrupted by pornographic work (chapter 3).
Despite this vagueness, the author affirms – this is his central thesis – that the profession of director like that of actor or actress are real professions which presuppose specific expertise, acquired on the job, in mastery of heterosexual sexuality. The pornographer differs from other professions concerned with the management of fantasies, such as sexologists and psychoanalysts, because they do not have a therapeutic aim and make fantasy a purely sexual notion. The work of the actors and actresses is to stage the desires of the spectators through a hyper-ritualization of heterosexuality. The latter also mobilize specific know-how: prolonged maintenance of an erection for the former, ease in relating to the camera for the latter and for all, the production of a “ authenticity », valued by customers and by themselves. This self-expression responds to a current of contemporary capitalism of self-expression in the profession.
The actresses speak
Another central and very original point of view, developed by Mathieu Trachman in the second part of the work, is that of the both dominated and active position of actresses in this masculine world of pornography which claims, reaffirms a triumphant heterosexuality . It is undoubtedly in these chapters (4 and 5) devoted to the comparative trajectories of actresses and actors that Mathieu Trachman deploys the most nuanced, subtle, strong and sometimes unexpected analysis of pornographic work.
By taking seriously what actresses say about the pleasure of exercising this profession which offers remuneration and a working atmosphere that are often more rewarding than those of the service professions they may have previously exercised, such as McDonald’s waitresses or center employees. appeals, the author breaks with a miserabilist vision of the work of pornography actresses without adhering to that of emancipation through transgression. Drawing on the thesis of feminist anthropologist Paola Tabet, who denounces the extortion of free sexual services from women in the marriage contract, he emphasizes that these services are remunerated in the pornographic employment contract. He evokes the power that actresses can acquire and which they must demonstrate in their profession: “ power to invest in a stigmatized activity, power to act in a context of sexual subordination, power to be affected within the framework of the pornographic script » (p. 139).
An unexpected result of his investigation is that of the higher salaries of actresses compared to those of actors. He explains it by a reversal of the naturalization of skills. While women’s lower salaries, particularly in services, are explained, in the literature on gender, by a mechanism of naturalization of their skills leading to their non-recognition – they would be by nature more altruistic and gifted for “ relational » — when it comes to sexual enjoyment, naturalization is on the side of men. They would be naturally » driven by a powerful desire and capable of endless pleasure, while women in this situation are considered “ abnormal » and must, in order to convincingly carry out these repeated sexual encounters in front of the camera, take initiatives, break with the presumed passive nature of their femininity.
The order of the sexes is, however, far from being abolished and Mathieu Trachman points this out in a relentless and documented manner. Actresses have shorter careers, debutantes are constantly renewed even if he was able to collect stories of longer and successful careers (chapter 5). Their working conditions are difficult, they have no medical monitoring. They come up against the glass ceiling and represent only 12% of directors in the film census established in Hot Video. Finally and above all, the silence of the actresses who left pornography and whom the author was unable to find raises the question of the violence of this work or of an impossible reconversion due to the reproachful look that society casts on actresses. .
A renewed feminism
In this work, Mathieu Trachman combines approaches to the sociology of sexuality, work and gender in a very innovative and mastered way. It shifts the attention of work on sexuality from the private sphere to the professional sphere. It applies the concepts of the sociology of work and professional groups to a world that it has left in the shadows, partly because it fears it. However, it is time to manage to think about sexuality and the body in work, in the most daily and ordinary interactions. Finally, it examines, in a rigorous and distanced manner, the feminist theses which have adopted a denunciatory posture with regard to “ sex work » and other productions of the sexual market, such as pornography. It brilliantly demonstrates the fertility of the approaches of this young and brilliant generation of feminists, who knew how to appropriate and disseminate in France Anglo-Saxon literature on gender and sexualities, far from school quarrels. The strength of the book lies in maintaining a demanding posture throughout the chapters, on the razor’s edge between revealing relationships of domination and attention to relationships of complicity, friendship, shared pleasures, particularly during filming moments. where ordinary life is suspended.
The author refuses to pass judgment on the quality of pornographic films and the investigation did not focus on their reception. However, we can wonder if the lack of flourishing nature of this activity and the symbolic discredit from which it suffers are not linked to the poverty of sexual scripts and their discrepancy in relation to developments not in capitalism but in social relations between the sexes. The characteristics of the films recalled by Mathieu Trachman – codified sequence of sexual practices, close-ups on the sexual organs, little importance attributed to the physical appearance of the male partner, staging of not very innovative fantasies, such as those of the “ bourgeois slut » which is given to working-class men or young Black people and mature women, seem in fact far removed from the expectations of women and men in matters of sexuality and their actual practices. Surveys on sexual behavior show in fact that the latter have expanded and diversified, particularly among women, even if the asymmetry remains between men and women due to the normative opposition, constantly reformulated, between a sexual desire imperative for the former, an affective sexuality for the latter.
Served by beautiful writing, this book makes you want to continue the investigation, on the reception side and beyond the borders.