今日吃瓜

Dr Zahra Stardust can’t be summed up in one sentence.

She’s a scholar, a writer, a lawyer, an artist, and a teacher. Zahra has more than fifteen years of experience working on social justice and human rights issues for community organisations, NGOs, universities, law firms, and UN bodies both in Australia and internationally.

She’s also former stripper, pole dancer, and porn practitioner.

Zahra masterfully ties the knowledge from these experiences together through a research approach she dubs “auto-pornographic ethnography”. The result- her debut book, Indie Porn, a personal yet highly researched piece of work that examines the motivations and interventions of independent porn producers as they navigate criminal laws, risk-averse platforms, discriminatory algorithms, and rampant piracy.

Mainstream Australia is in the midst of a sexual revolution- we are discussing sex, consent, violence, pleasure and kink like never before. But with that comes the rehashing of conversations from decades past, reanimated for a 21st century audience.

The Sydney Opera House’s All About Women festival faced criticism earlier this year for one of their sessions entitled “Is It Time to Rethink Porn?” Sex worker advocacy groups Scarlet Alliance and SWOP NSW spoke out against the lack of sex worker voices in a panel that was supposedly offering a “feminist” take on porn.

Unfortunately, this is nothing new.

“We are at a time when there is a significant backlash against porn,” Zahra said. “We should remember that for decades sex workers have been enriching feminism, offering contributions based on the experience of being sexually stigmatised and socially derided. There is a long history of feminists being involved in the production of explicit media. This has both about representation 鈥� challenging sexual scripts and foregrounding women鈥檚 agency, desires and subjectivity 鈥� as well as about taking a feminist care ethics to porn production.”

Sex work has been a vital part of Zahra’s life, enriching both her identity and her research, offering a politics, ethics and community. But Indie Porn does not treat porn as a monolith. There are good and bas aspects to porn, and it’s this nuance that is so often missing when we engage in discussions around porn.

The politics of porn

In May this year, the Australian government dedicated $6.5 million to age assurance technologies to prevent children from accessing explicit content, as part of its response to our national family violence crisis. One of the ways they’re suggesting we achieve this is through the use of facial recognition software to estimate the ages of porn users.

“My colleagues and I conducted research into state-of-the-art age estimation software and found both racial and gender bias: it worked best on white faces, worst on dark faces, was more likely to misclassify boys than girls, and got peoples ages wrong by up to 40 years,” Zahra says.

“Meanwhile, nothing is being invested in porn literacy programs that could actually equip people with the skills they need to understand sexually explicit media. There are many examples of porn performers successfully using pornography as part of adult sex education programs 鈥� either making explicit sex ed videos or using pornography to prompt critical conversations. Porn performers have so much to offer in terms of queer sex education, not only about media literacy and labour politics but also about consent, communication, representation and sexual ethics.”

Even when we are allowed to watch porn, the types of acts we see on our screens are also controlled by the Australian government. The Australian Classification Board will refuse classification to films that include various prohibited fetishes such as body piercing, application of substances like candle wax, “golden showers” (urination- female ejaculation can also be excluded on this basis), bondage, spanking or fisting. Some content can be banned through the reasoning that it is “revolting or abhorrent phenomena in such a way that they offend against the standards of morality, decency and propriety generally accepted by reasonable adults”.

The Australian government, famously “reasonable adults”.

In Indie Porn, Zahra recounts the multiple times she opened up an adult magazine she was in, only to find that the editors had digitally airbrushed her labia minora in order to meet classification requirements that prohibit 鈥渋ndiscreet genital detail.鈥� Her own, unedited body, was illegal.

“Censorship has a chilling effect on the kinds of content people create,” she says. “In porn, the criminalisation and prohibition of various queer and kink practices (by governments and platforms) means that many audiences only see narrow representations of bodies, desires and sexual practices.”

“On social media more generally, queerphobic algorithms frequently capture LGBTQ content, and creators face deplatforming, demotion and demonetisation.”

As queer people, we’re often subject to censorship from social media platforms. Only this year, Instagram labelled a photo of two dads and their baby as “graphic” and “sensitive” content. Even the language we use to describe ourselves can flag sensitivity filters- in 2021, “” or “le dollar bean” took off on TikTok in order to avoid its queerphobic algorithm.

Porn today and tomorrow

Whether you like it or not, porn is here to stay, and whatever stance you take, the politics of it will effect your life in some way.

“Pornography is not something outside culture,” Zahra says.聽“Many of us produce or disseminate explicit media, through the use of dating apps or sexting. If you have ever taken a nude and sent it to a lover, you may have considered many of the issues porn performers do in terms of how that image will be stored and what happens if it is monetised without your consent. Somebody you love is probably a porn performer!”

Zahra Stardust is currently on a book tour for the release of Indie Porn,聽and has already been to Meanjin (Brisbane) and London. You can find her in (Sydney) on 28 November, (Perth) on 3 December, and (Melbourne) on 5 December.