She became the UK’s first female porn director in 1998 and her debut film, Eat Me/ Keep Me, aired on Television X in 1999.
“I want to make it acceptable for women to buy it – that’s an important part of my job,” she tells TNT over the phone from her home in Kent. She’s as unapologetic about her views as you’d expect from someone who, a decade into making pornography, became the Liberal Democrats’ candidate for Gravesham.
Arrowsmith will take on formidable Aussie feminist Germaine Greer at a debate on porn’s role in society this week, hosted by Intelligence Squared at the Royal Institution in central London.
The evening posits the idea that, rather than turn viewers into desensitised, sick-minded slavering fuckbeasts (TNT’s words, not theirs), pornography in fact has a positive impact on people. Arrowsmith will be arguing for that motion and Greer – no surprise – will be railing against it.
Whatever your feelings on the subject, there’s little doubt Arrowsmith is a pioneer. Her work, which she terms “female point of view” porn, tries a different tack to the typical stuff coming out of the US industry (so to speak).
Anna Arrowsmith
“I don’t say I make porn for women, I make it from a female perspective,” Arrowsmith tells us. This involves subtle tweaks to the format, such as greater attention to realism and plot.
“I didn’t want to do the, ‘here’s a prim and proper young lady and here comes the pizza boy to show her what sex is all about’,” Arrowsmith explains. Instead, there are more believable storylines. Think 2003’s Pound A Punnet, which is about women working on London market stalls and having sex in their lunch hours.
There’s also more variety: “I don’t market it by single sex acts, so I don’t just do all anal or all gang bangs or whatever.” Presumably mixing it up is more in keeping with a woman’s ability to multi-task than a man’s one-track mind.
Another thing Arrowsmith has brought to the industry – and which the ladies both working in porn and watching it are probably most thankful for – is good-looking men.
“When I started shooting in ’98, there was very little choice and I had to go out of my way to audition a lot of guys and get new men into the industry,” the director reveals. “In America, [there were just] pig-ugly, 40- or 50-year-old men with 20-year-old women.”
US porn industry director Max Hardcore and star Layla Rivera
She says this has largely changed throughout porn moviedom now, but her films remain progressive by including shots from the “female eye line” that linger on male actors; Arrowsmith points out that porn is traditionally “shot from a man’s perspective”.
Breaking into the boys’ club that is the porn movie business hasn’t won the director all-round plaudits – although the industry itself has awarded her a number of accolades, including Indie Porn Pioneer at the Feminist Porn Awards in Toronto and Best Director (twice) at the UK Adult Film & TV Awards.
Her first forays into making pornography were when she studied at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. Arrowsmith wrote a dissertation called Towards A New Pornography and submitted an accompanying film (“My adverts for performers to appear [in it] were defaced and torn down by members of staff and my final film was refused a public airing,” she confesses).
She also faced a few stark realities when working on her first porn shoot: “The man couldn’t get an erection, which I hadn’t even thought of! It was outside in October so that may have been why.”
Porn industry star Jenna Jameson
Funnily enough, it seems to be largely women who take offence to this well-educated female who enjoys filming people shagging; Greer won’t be the first feminist that Arrowsmith’s butted heads against.
Gail Dines, an internationally renowned feminist and anti-porn activist, once said of Arrowsmith: “Women who work in the sex industry and promote this in the name of feminism are the scabs of the feminist movement.”
Sure, Arrowsmith identifies herself as a feminist, telling us the mainstream porn industry is “sexist” and that she’s against the “sexualisation of imagery of women”. If you find that hard to process along with the fact Arrowsmith has made money from asking women to have sex on camera, it’s not as nonsensical as you might think.
“If you’re dealing with sex then using sexual imagery is justified,” she reasons. “If you’re selling carpets and using female beauty to do it, that’s unjustifiable.” It seems in Arrowsmith’s view, advertisements in which women are always doing the cleaning and looking after the children are far more damaging to society than porn.
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Germaine Greer
We won’t reveal all of Arrowsmith’s arguments for porn lest Greer is sneakily reading this. Not that the director is worried: “I don’t think she’s got very good arguments about the subject.” But what we will say is that history doesn’t appear to be on the side of those who wish to stamp it out.
Graphic depictions of sex in art pre-date civilisation (think naughty prehistoric rock carvings), and even the trailblazers for civilisation itself, the Romans, loved their erotica (plenty of fruity finds were dug up in the first large-scale excavations of Pompeii in the 1860s).
It’s likely that so long as there are people, there’ll be porn. So if it’s here to stay, perhaps it is better men and women learn to love it equally. After all, the idea of women liking porn has already entered the mainstream (some would say not before time), thanks to 50 Shades Of Grey.
“I didn’t finish because it was so bad,” Arrowsmith laughs when we ask for an opinion on EL James’ “mummy porn”. “[Forgetting] the content of the book, though, I wholeheartedly support what she’s done. The fact women are out there making this stuff is for the better.”
On set of Hug A Hoodie
Arrowsmith, however, might not go out there and make this stuff ever again. She’s taken a three-year hiatus from filming to study for a PhD and, having increased the Lib Dem vote share by more than the regional average when she stood for Gravesham in 2010 (Nick Clegg was a master of understatement when he said her profession wasn’t his “cup of tea”, but added at least she wasn’t “a cardboard cut-out Westminster politician”), she doesn’t rule out a return to politics.
But why might she not go back to porn? The ease of having her copyright ripped off on the web – a problem that, she insists, is sinking independent filmmakers like herself and allowing only the big (male-dominated) companies to survive. “It’s got to make money,” she says. “I’m not going to do it for nothing, you know?”
And suddenly it occurs to us that Anna Arrowsmith not making porn might be bad for society. Who woulda thunk it?
Pornography Is Good For Us.
April 23, 7pm. £10. 21 Albemarle Street, W1S 4BSQ
Tube | Green Park
Tickets have sold out, but you can join the wait list at intelligencesquared.com
More on Anna Arrowsmith at annaspansdiary.com
See her campaign site for sex workers at weconsent.org
Photos: Getty; Thinkstock
