Author and director, Ovidie has been exploring the subject of the body and our social relationship to the body for several years. Her latest work addresses more specifically, in the form of a first-person account, the case of a mechanism of stigmatization of which she was both the witness and the target, which she calls the “slut-shaming”. By this expression, it designates a form of stigmatization which targets women and which consists of making them feel guilty whenever their behavior – and in particular their sexuality – is considered provocative.
In order to understand the mechanisms, Ovidie retraces, through his own personal journey, the history of the 1990s-2000s during which we witnessed the emergence of “porno chic”. At the time, fashion, cinema and the media spread pornographic images into dominant culture and helped to legitimize a certain sexualization of women’s bodies.
The reflection that Ovidie offers on this story is all the more relevant since she herself participated in this phenomenon of “porno chic”: she knows this period from the inside and even experienced, at the time, a certain enthusiasm for what was then perceived as a freer image of women’s bodies and sexuality.
But on the other hand, her personal journey and recent events (starting with #MeToo) have led her to re-examine this image: is this hypersexualization of women’s bodies not still a way, after their long concealment, of subjecting them to judgment and masculine standards?
The era of “porn chic”
Ovidie emphasizes how, in 1990, she was convinced “that it was necessary to produce counter-discourses around sexualities”. It is in this perspective that the counter-images of “porno chic” fit in – which, in retrospect, seem problematic or at least deserve to be re-examined. The author recounts the role attributed to women in this context and the legitimizing discourses that were then put forward.
At the time, the objective of certain actresses, but also of certain newspapers or magazines, was not to ban porn, but to produce “better” porn. Ovidie explains that their strategy consisted of approaching sexualities – the plural is essential – and their representations in positive terms, to combat misogyny on one of its grounds and with the same weapons.
But the work places these convictions in a broader and more complex context, where feminist movements are multiplying and where certain terms are adopted by the public (“pro-sex”, “sex-positive”etc.). However, over the course of their media circulation, these terms become loaded with ambiguities and end up serving as decoys. Therefore, how can we understand the abolitionist speeches which “defend the idea that both pornography and prostitution are intrinsically degrading to women”? Ovidie is not fooled, and does not reject the feminism of the time on the side of “anti-sex”.
Throughout his story, Ovidie recreates a “trajectory”, that is to say parts of his personal life recaptured by a reflective process, rather than a biography – a genre that is always linear and psychologized. Thus, she does not seek to hide how, by showing herself in her films, she no longer belonged to herself, nor how, by using television to disseminate political thought, she too became a television product. But she analyzes these points from the angle of a reflection on the status of product, rather than from the psychological or moral angle of regret.
From then on, an aporia arises: is it possible to shoot films in the genre of porn under ethical conditions? And this is compounded by the question of the relationship between aesthetics and politics: should we make an aesthetic film to the detriment of politics, or a political film to the detriment of aesthetics?
After #MeToo: reconsider everything
The meaning of these reflections has recently been disrupted by the #MeToo movement. After the story of the fruitful era of “porno chic”, Ovidie closely studies later films (directed for example by Nagisa Oshima or Marco Bellocchio) and reconsiders the codes of pornography. She also examines Nymphomaniac by Lars von Trier, a cultured film which used pornographic actors – notably as stunt doubles – to shoot certain explicit sexual scenes. She describes scenes from other films, indicating when the station chiefs are respectful – and when they are not.
Ovidie also reports on the judgments made on women in general, and even more on those who work around porn. She insists on this essential dimension of the actor’s profession: learning to dissociate reality and its representation, even when those around us – and the social gaze – insist on confusing them. In fact, if we accept most of the time the lie of the image as a principle of cinema, we tend to forget it when it comes to the representation of a sexual act.
At the end of reading, we necessarily wonder: could we shoot such a film, such a scene, in the same way today? Ovidie reminds us that we can no longer avoid a head-on analysis of sexist and sexual violence in cinema, audiovisual and live performance, nor give up making it visible. However, this does not prohibit extending the reflection of pro-sex feminists or “porn studies”. On one condition, however: that emancipation, always claimed, ceases to be confused with a new form of alienation.
