Episode Two: Meet MsNaughty, the Feminist Pornographer

Jenny: Welcome to the Jenny Raven podcast. Meet Ms. Naughty. Welcome to this podcast with me, Jenny Raven. This is podcast number three with Miss Naughty, all the way from Australia on the other side of the world. So, Miss Naughty, how are you doing today?

MsNaughty: Oh, I’m having a fantastic day. Yes. Thank you.

Jenny: So, just to set the tone of our conversation, let’s have a few playful questions so our listeners can get a sense of who you really are. So, first question, PVC or rubber?

MsNaughty: I think pvc.

Jenny: Satin or lace?

MsNaughty: Satin.

Jenny: Red or black?

MsNaughty: Black.

Jenny: Ideal height of heels for wearing on camera?

MsNaughty: On camera, I would say ideal height for me is no height at all. But on camera, oh, you know, three inches. I don’t know.

Jenny: And for you personally, on camera or behind the camera?

MsNaughty: Oh, absolutely, behind the camera. I am too shy and, oh, no, I couldn’t do it. I’d be saying the light’s in the wrong position. Move the camera. You can’t do it. I couldn’t concentrate.

Jenny: And your preferred medium for creation? Photos, video or words?

MsNaughty: At this point, I’m saying words. I’m really enjoying writing.

Jenny: And your focus for your medium, boys or girls?

MsNaughty: I think both boys and girls.

Jenny: And would that be solo, twosome, threesome or more?

MsNaughty: All of the above. Everything is wonderful. Anything to do with people enjoying themselves. I am very keen for it.

Jenny: How would you describe yourself?

MsNaughty: Ah, well, firstly, it’s very nice to be here. Thank you. Well, I describe myself as a feminist pornographer. And I’ve been. I’ve been making porn online for 24 years. So, you know, you could say I’m a filmmaker, I’m a writer, I guess you’d call it a content creator now. But I’m so I make porn for women. I make porn for anybody who’s looking for anything that’s different from the mainstream. So the labels are sort of ethical porn, alternative porn.

Jenny: And what are your websites? How can we find your work?

MsNaughty: Okay, my main site is bright desire.com. that’s where I’ve got all my films. My blog site is msnaughty.com and that’s where I’ve got a lot of written stuff that goes back a long way, so. And those sites lead to all sorts of other places if you want to follow various website adventures.

Jenny: Why do you think you were drawn to this industry in the first place? Or self expression or. What is it about it that initially attracted you?

MsNaughty: I started making porn online. I had an interest in making porn that was for women. So we go back to the year 2000 and I was writing for a women’s magazine in Australia that was similar to Playgirl. So I was writing about sex and I wrote an article that was about whether there was any porn online for women. And I went looking. I found a community of women who were making their own brand of pornography. And back then, of course, it’s only just pictures. We’re using dial up modems. It was pretty slow, but so the idea was to make porn that looked different and that reflected the desires and fantasies of straight women. So it sort of grew from there. I was originally sort of interested in writing. We used other people’s photos. We’d sort through a lot of photos and find what we thought was sexy. I was writing erotic fiction. The years went by, I learned how to make films and so next thing I knew, I’m shooting people having sex. And then it became about how can I capture a much more realistic and sex positive and female friendly version of sex than you see in regular porn? So that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.

Jenny: And of course, I don’t want to say too much, but that’s how we initially met at a conference about filmmaking and we formed the friendship which has gone over the decades now.

MsNaughty: Yes.

Jenny: How would you describe, you know, holding the camera on that very first films that you made?

MsNaughty: It was very nerve wracking at that point. We went along and there was a friend I knew in the industry and he was actually the one behind the camera. And my husband Luke also held the camera and I was standing there doing the pointing, being the director. But about halfway through, I mean, it was nerve wracking that there was two people. And there was a lot of hesitation before I finally said, okay, off you go. And it’s quite confronting to be in the room with two people having sex. So. But it got to the point halfway through I just said, here, give me the camera, I’ve got to get some shots here. So from then on I was, we had two cameras and I was shooting. So it was a total, it was just a two person crew of me and my husband doing everything. And yeah, it’s, yeah, it’s hard to direct. You just, you know what shots you want and it’s very hard to tell someone where to put the camera. So you just do it yourself. So, yeah.

Jenny: And since that very first film, how have you evolved as an erotic filmmaker?

MsNaughty: It’s a good question. Thank you. Yeah, I think my technique’s got a lot better. Obviously I know what to expect there. Isn’t that sort of general, oh my God, what am I doing scenario. So something I’ve often found is that, you know, you, you very quickly forget that what you’re doing is extremely strange, that you’re filming people having sex and, and it starts to become about, well, I need to capture this moment. I need to have a. See what their faces are doing. You, you know, you really want to capture the moment. So like, I, I’ve, I’ve gone along. That’s where I’ve aimed. I’ve, you know, we’ve been low budget the whole way, so technically it wasn’t ever. It never got that great. You know, we were filming in hotel rooms and, you know, rented houses. Anything that we could, anywhere we could film. So, you know, but. So my entire filmmaking career is absolutely DIY el cheapo type stuff. But, you know, I think I got better and I got, I got very good at editing. So, yeah, it was, it’s been, it’s been a journey. And I, you know, I sort of started to get really. I started to try and do a few more interesting things with the stories I was telling. But, you know, with porn, it’s always challenging to not have any dialogue. I mean, it’s because you’ve, you’ve got that thing where people just want to see sex, but you do actually want to set something up. And a lot of the time dialogue isn’t really, you know, the people in the, in the film aren’t very good at acting or. So, yeah, it’s sort of you. We got good at coming up with visual ways to tell a story. Yeah.

Jenny: And how has the industry. I mean, let’s just actually, before we get into that, let’s drill down into ethical porn, feminist porn. You know, one of the big markers or the big indicators that what you’re doing is different to a mainstream. I’ve spoken about in some other podcasts where, you know, I’ve noticed in mainstream porn there seems to be a very clear structure and it’s, you know, it becomes for me personally, slightly unwatchable. About a third was the way in. I’m like, I’m done. Like, you know, we’re in two. Like, it’s, it’s too extreme for me and I don’t understand why it dominates because there doesn’t seem to be anything sexy about it at a certain point. But how do you think what you do differs from that? And what tips would you offer?

MsNaughty: So, I mean. Yeah, a tip for shooting. Well, I guess one of the things with ethical porn, you can sort of start by defining what it isn’t. And, you know, so, yeah, mainstream porn, it’s got these tropes like the camera focuses on the woman. If we’re talking here heterosexual, of course, heterosexual porn, the camera is always on the woman. It cuts the guy out of the frame. It always usually ends with, you know, a cum shot that’s on, you know, money shot on the face. There’s sort of a lot of action, a lot of focus on genitalia. There’s, you know, set positions and set times that things go for. It is very formulaic. So you could. I’ve written a lot about, you know, what is feminist porn, what’s ethical porn? And it comes down to this. You could talk about what the style of it is versus, you know, how it’s made, the actual production, the production of it. So. But if we’re talking stylistically, at least what I’ve tried to do, I really made an effort to make sure that we were looking at the connection between two people. It didn’t have to be about genitals and what people were doing. You know, it was always useful to have that shot so you had context of what was going on. But, you know, I wanted people’s faces. I wanted to see them looking at each other. If they were smiling, I wanted to see how they were interacting. So for me, a lot of my effort was on, yeah, looking at people’s faces and yet making sure that we could see the guy, making sure. And it didn’t have to follow a script. So a lot of the time with what I was shooting, I didn’t. I didn’t script how they were going to have sex. They’d probably have a chat beforehand about what they wanted to do. And that’s all part of the consent process as well, is that, you know, you get your performers to talk about what they plan to do, what gets them off, that sort of thing. And then, you know, we’d just go rolling and they’d do whatever the hell they wanted to do. And the only time we’d stop was, you know, if something went wrong with the camera or knocked a light over once, that was a disaster. You know, stuff like that. There was one in a film called Trinity, where was a threesome, and the female performer just. She had an orgasm, burst into tears. Because that’s just. It was intense for her. We had this moment where we. We thought, do we stop rolling or do we capture this? And we just shut the hell up, grit our teeth and hope that she was okay. And that was, as it turned out, you know, that was just how she felt. It she was, she was really in the moment and enjoyed it. And so. But it was, you know, we had that moment of panic, as, you know, do we need to stop? So, yeah, so. And then, of course, you talk about all of the rules of ethical porn, which is, you know, you’ve got to make consent explicit, you’ve got to make sure your performers are paid properly and looked after. And, you know, there’s entire reams of stuff that I could. I could rave on about how we define ethical porn. In a way, it’s a marketing term because, you know, you. So anybody can say that they’re ethical porn. You sort of don’t necessarily know, but it’s just. It’s a handy way to say, well, okay, look, we’re just trying to do things differently, we’re trying to present things differently. And I think, you know, we’re trying to step away from that mainstream aesthetic, which is so very cliched. And, you know, they’ve been doing the same thing ever since I started and it’s so boring.

Jenny: One thing I’ve noticed is it takes a particular kind of person to be in front of the camera. And certainly in my work, the camera is part of the narrative. Have you found that people enjoy having. Being the focus. Being the focus of attention, obviously, but also in the frame, as it were?

MsNaughty: Oh, yeah, I think. Well, a lot of performers are exhibitionists and I’ve got. Just to give an example, there’s a gender queer star called Jizzly who is a good friend and they. We shot in Berlin with someone called Bishop Black. They had a fantastic time, so they were both into each other. But, you know, in the interview, Je said that they were also aware of the camera and it added to their enjoyment so that they would sort of come in and out of the realisation that they were being filmed. But then, you know, then they were like, when we film, we do try to be really unobtrusive. I’m not going to tell. I’m not going to yell at people while they’re fucking. You know, you don’t want to inter. You don’t want to ruin the flow, especially if they’re having a good time. So we, yeah, we try and stay unobtrusive and. But yeah, I think it’s definitely. There are a lot of porn performers are really. They like the idea that they’re being watched and it probably forms part of their fantasy as they’re being filmed. So I think it’s probably an integral part of porn. Yeah, as the. Just, just the idea that there Is a camera has. It has a. I mean, there’s whole essays written on this as well. All right, yeah, so I’ll stop there.

Jenny: You’re clearly working at the feminine end of porn, and masculine is mainstream. I don’t know whether that’s a particularly helpful way to describe it, but we’ll certainly use it for now. If someone were to want to answer at the feminine end, what are the things that you would advise them to do to focus on, to escape the tropes of mainstream porn?

MsNaughty: So I think, yeah, you know, there’s been a lot of discussion about, you know, gender roles and what these things can mean. And certainly, yeah, you know, I work with. With queer porn performers and have friends in the queer porn industry. So the lines can be a bit blurred when we start talking masculine, feminine, at least in that kind of perspective. So I think. I think it’s more a matter of, you know. Yeah, so a mask. If we. If we’re talking about a masculine viewpoint, that’s the mainstream viewpoint. It is the idea that we’re putting male pleasure first. So how that fits into male, female versus masculine, feminine is. It’s tricky. I mean, that’s one of the things with my films is the idea that I was keen to show female orgasms because there’s very few of them in mainstream porn. You know, the focus is on the male orgasm.

Jenny: So if mainstream porn has an inherently male gaze perspective, and let’s remove gender and sex, as in, you know, what sex type you are at birth and all of that, let’s park that to one side and let’s just look at it from a storytelling and a visuals and a content perspective. At the one end there is a kind of male gaze, and at the other end there is a female gaze. And I think probably one of the best indicators of that is that is that male. Male gaze porn tends to have women very seriously performing. Like, it’s so divorced from any kind of reality. But what you do feels almost like documentary filmmaking.

MsNaughty: Yeah, well, actually, it’s a good point. And that sort of. I could add, it was a bugbear of mine that in mainstream porn, people always look down the barrel of the camera. And a lot of the time I didn’t want that to happen. And yeah, because I wanted that documentary style. I wanted it to be. Let’s, you know, let’s just watch people and not feel like we’re in the room there. You know, there’s a whole other style where you can acknowledge the camera and that’s, you know, there’s There’s a lot to it. But then, you know, that would be this pouting at the camera as, you know. What would you say? Yeah, sort of performing for the camera and then there’s experiencing sexuality and acknowledging that the camera’s there, you know, so you could. You could look at it two separate ways like that. And I think the word authenticity gets thrown around and, you know, the documentary style is the idea. Let’s try and capture something that at least looks authentic, looks more like how people have sex versus that really. That really performative way of creating porn. And, I mean, I know plenty of people and plenty of performers like doing porn that way, and that’s fine. You know, it’s not going to say that that’s bad, but, yeah, it’s. It’s still. It’s still interesting to. To try and create that more realistic version. So in terms of. If we just throw it back to the feminine, the masculine, I think it’s more a matter of what. What feels right for the audience and how you’re going to. How are you going to reflect their experiences best. So I guess it’s a matter of, you know, is. Do they. Does your audience want something like that? For me, I was. I was always sort of making for what I would prefer to see. So, you know, I was my own audience a lot of the time. So.

Jenny: Yeah, yeah, I think. I think that’s a really good. A good point because certainly from my perspective, everything I’m doing is very much about exploring what I want to see. An experience that isn’t served to me by the mainstream media of the mainstream porn industry. I mean, shockingly not supplied to me and always surprises me enormously because I see myself as being fairly normal, even though I’ve clearly got several major kinks in the cupboard, but they’re not particularly dramatic ones. And it always amazes me that mainstream is so performative and derivative and basically unwatchable at a certain point. For me personally, I understand everybody has their own tastes. Have you. Have you worked at all with trans actresses?

MsNaughty: You know, it’s funny, I’ve worked with trans men, but. And I’ve been to festivals with trans actresses, but we never got around to making anything with the trans actress. And it was. It was just a matter of. We just didn’t. The opportunity never came up. So I’ve. I’ve licenced films with trans actresses, but, yeah, it’s sort of. I mean, my focus for my site was mainly heterosexual, but we sort of. We did queer porn mainly just because people were there and they were a lot of. It was the opportunity, if someone was there and keen to make some porn with us. We went, okay, let’s go. So it was only. Just didn’t get a chance to. I think that they’re fantastic, to be honest. Although, you know, they’ve put me out of business or not really, but I mean, I think there’s still. There’s still a place for someone making films the way I make films. But I think it’s fantastic because the performers now have the power to make the content that they want to make and to get paid properly for what they’re doing, you know, so previously it’s sort of. There’s been the philtre of the director of the production company of whoever’s got the money to make the film. So. And of course then the performers are doing. Reconnecting, then the performers are doing what the director wants. So I think it’s great that there’s that more direct access in terms of what. What you’re seeing. I mean, there’s this. It’s still. I. I see a lot of only fans stuff that’s just replicating what you see in regular porn. So, yeah, I still think that there’s plenty of space for people to, you know, make more. I don’t know what you’d call it. Ambitious films, I guess, or. Yeah, so. But I think it’s great.

Jenny: What advice would you offer somebody entering the industry at this point in technology, shall we say?

MsNaughty: Technology? Well, I mean, you can. Everyone can make porn with an iPhone. I mean, it’s. That’s the democratise. Sorry, I’ll say that again, that’s the democratisation of pornography that’s happened. You know, 11 years ago at the Feminist Porn Conference, we were talking about how the democracy democratisation has happened and now it’s just. It’s just completely exploded. So I think, you know. But obviously good lighting helps. Yeah. Daylight, having a nice day, everything looks good with nice, nice light coming in through a window. You need. You need good sound. And I say this is someone who’s had crap sound in most of her films. But as I said, you know, two people, low budget. That’s me. But yeah, you can. You could probably set up your own filmmaking thing, you know, just from Amazon with. Or ebay, just with some LED lights and a decent iPhone and a mic. Obviously it helps. I think it helps to have two cameras or even more I like the. And to edit it. I think editing is. Oh, editing is so important because so much porn can just go on and on and on. And on it gets boring and, you know, you end up with so much footage and you’re there going, what am I going to do? I can’t possibly leave this out. And then you have to be ruthless and try and think, well, hang on, what’s going to work best? So I think, yeah, get a decent editing programme. And that would also be my recommendation. Beyond that, I’m old on the Internet and I’m old in porn and I don’t know that much more. I can’t add much more to that.

Jenny: Obviously, you know where your world and my world converges, using words. Because much of what’s on your site is written. What is your experience in the written word and how people respond to it?

MsNaughty: You know, it’s funny, I don’t get a lot of feedback, but I think. I think the written word gives you so much more scope for your imagination to do what you want. You’re not limited by someone else’s interpretation of how something should look or how somebody should look, what they should be wearing. You know, obviously with, you know, cross dressing, trans erotica, it’s probably the same for you. It’s a delightful way to explore things and it’s just. It’s. It’s. Yeah, I think it’s one of the best ways to connect with sexual fantasy, with sexuality and. Yeah, really fire up the imagination. I think it’s great.

Jenny: So my final question. What would you consider to be, I suppose, both the high point of your career and your contribution to the industry?

MsNaughty: Oh, wow. I was really pleased. I was named indie porn icon in 2017 by the Feminist Porn Awards. I thought, oh, that’s really nice. So I’m very proud of that. I made a film with Jizz Lee called dear jizz in 2013, and in it, this was when genderqueer was very unusual and different and it was. Jiz read out letters from their fans and it’s quite emotional. And this film has gone to so many festivals and it’s. It’s even been in an art gallery. It’s considered to be an art piece. And there’s. So. Even though it’s not something that I originally even set out to make, I sort of thought I was going to be heterosexual focused, all that sort of thing. Deejesus sort of become this really important career milestone for me because I think it spoke to a lot of people and it’s. Yeah, I think it was an important cultural moment in porn, so I’m really proud of it.

Jenny: Amazing. Well, thank you so much for giving us your time and I can’t wait to get this ever sitting over to you.

MsNaughty: Oh, well, it’s been lovely. Thank you very much.

Jenny: Thank you girls for listening to my podcast. I really appreciate you listening all the way through to the end. If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve heard, then please consider going over to my we*****@********en.com and join my mailing list. Then you’ll get information about all of my very, very naughty things that I send out on a regular basis. You’ll also get access to a couple of my free stories. You can either read them, or better still, you can experience them as an audio journey where I will directly encourage you to dress up for me in your favourite costume and do very, very, very unspeakably naughty things. I can’t wait for you to send me photos of that experience with me.