A big part of my porn is the interview segments. A lot of people speak for sex workers in this country, but we seldom let them speak for themselves. And I think it’s important to let them speak, and to let them speak freely, in order to create this three-dimensional image. It’s still an image; I’m not claiming that this is the real person behind the porn star. They’re still performing for the camera. But I do think that it gives people a better sense of who they are as people, as three-dimensional human beings, rather than essentially what I would consider bad porn, which is porn that has sex robots, who arrive, and fuck and then depart, and you don’t know anything about them, or why they’re fucking, or what their deal is.

From an interview with Tristan Taormino (emphases mine) at Feministing (which I long ago removed from our blog role because of the uncritical pro-sex industry stance of its posts).

Two points to make here. Firstly, the interviews in porn films are often held up as ‘proof’ (especially with BDSM porn) that the women choose to be there, are having a great time, yadda yadda; but here we have a so-called ‘feminist’ pornographer* admitting that those are just another performance and not any real kind of truth!

Secondly, if we, as anti pornography feminists, referred to the women in porn as ‘sex robots’, we’d have a bunch of ‘sex positive’ ‘feminists’ accusing us of being ‘haters’, but apparently this kind of language is fine if it comes from a female pornographer.

* Taormino calls herself a feminist, so let’s ignore the fact that she has collaborated with completely main-stream pornographers, including John Stagliano, who is credited with starting the gonzo genre of pornography, that she filmed three ‘guides’ to anal sex for women, since apparently just one wasn’t enough to help men pressure their girl friends into it, and two films with ‘Rough Sex’ in the title.