Daily Texan Staff
Perhaps the reason Sigmund Freud never found the answer to his deceptively simple question "What do women want?" is that he was thinking too broadly. The famed doctor foolishly belly-flopped into a pool of bewilderment, failing to break his clueless male query into navigatable subcategories. Why couldn't he have simply stroked his bearded chin and pondered, "What do women want ... from creepy Austrian psychologists?"
At least UT film students Maggie Carey and Elena Carr know it's easier to answer Freud's question one category at a time. In Ladyporn a part documentary, part narrative screening at SXSW tomorrow the two explore what women want out of the films that have bankrolled the hand lotion industry for years.
"We had a lot of similar requests," Carey said. "The women we talked to wanted a natural looking woman, they didn't want anal sex, they didn't want 'the money shot,' they didn't want to see women abused. They wanted more romance, more of a relationship between the man and the woman, character development."
The Foreplay
The idea for Ladyporn stemmed from a discussion Carey and Carr had during their first semester as graduate film students at UT. Carey, who had recently seen the John Holmes documentary Wad, suggested making a porn as a project for their documentary class. Wanting to diverge as far as possible from the phallo-centric feel of most porn movies, Carey and Carr set out to make the kind of film fornication that would appeal to the fairer sex.
"We were trying to make it kind of a touching film. We wanted to make a good porn," Carr said. "But we had amateur actors and with us being new filmmakers ... I think some people will watch it and think we're parodying porn. We tried to make it as good as possible, but I think at times it does seem like we are making fun of the genre."
Carey and Carr added a comedic element to the film, lightening the taboo subject matter with some of the cliches that are prevalent in many porn entries.
"We have all these scenes with buff-looking guys without their shirts on just to make fun of the idea that women want to see hot guys," Carr said. "There's this one scene that Maggie wrote where the protagonist in the porn sees this hot guy in a bathing suit and she drools, so you see these reactions that are really outrageous."
"In every scene I shot, I tried to include at least a partially naked guy," Carey said.
The Down-and-Dirty
Finding guys willing to parade their birthday suits on camera wasn't a problem; finding a woman willing to do the same was. While the first 30 minutes of Ladyporn contains the documentary aspect of the film -- how cary and Carr made the porn, including behind-the-scenes (ha, ha, ha .. nevermind) footage of auditioins and rehearsals -- the remaining 15 minutes is the actual "ladyporn" of the title.
The porn, called "The Magic Comic Book," tells the story of Marcus, a 22-year-old virgin who dates Erin, a sexy 29-year-old advertising executive. The two are in love, but Marcos is a perfectionist who doesn't want to bed his lovely lady until the timing is ideal.
One of Erin's friends buys her a magic erotic comic book to ease her frustration at dating the only 22-year-old virgin who isn't a Star Trek fanatic. In the film, the illustrations dissolve into a real sex scene, transforming into a kind of naughtier version of A-Ha's "Take on Me" video.
"We were really scared for a long time that we wouldn't be able to find a woman who would actually have sex on-camera," Carey said. "We had gotten so far along in the progress of the film that we had to commit, we had to make this porn to make it all worth while. A lot of women were scared off ... we wanted people to take their clothes off so we knew they would be comfortable in front of the camera."
Carey and Carr finally decided on Traci and David, a married couple who answered the ad the two filmmakers placed in the paper.
"They have a Web camera in their home and they do different kinds of performance art on that, so they are already pretty open sexually," Carey said. "Also, they are really loving and we wanted that natural love to come through."
The "natural love" that the movie conveys was one of the factors women metioned when asked what they thought would make a good ladyporn. Still, Carey and Carr doubt that all of the answers they received mirror what the women actually think.
"We bring up in the documentary at the end, how can these answers be real when there's a camera in your face, you're being recorded, with your friends around you going, 'hee, hee, hee, porn,'" Carr said. "I don't think I'd give my real answer in that situation. They told us some pretty specific things they didn't want to see, but no one really dove into their own, personal fantasies. I think that is why people are so caught up in porn, because it hits all these different taboo regions and I don't think the women we talked to really wanted to discuss that."
If Ladyporn doesn't inject more estrogen into the sex-industry's hairy, penis-worshipping arm, at least it might spark more conversation among women about what it is they want to see on film.
"We're hoping that the screening will cause those conversations to occur, we want people to leave the screening saying, 'well, what do you think? Did they make a porn for women? Oh, I don't think that was for women, I didn't like it,'" Carr said. "If they won't talk to us about it on-camera, maybe they'll talk to each other in their car on the way home or something."
The Climax
The film has stimulated mush conversation already, especially among those who feel that porn is an inappropriate subject for a "serios" film.
"The professor of the class that we filmed Ladyporn for didn't even like talking about the project," Carr said. "We had to prove to her that it was legal to shoot porn in Texas; we had to call the County Clerk's office, find out the laws and report back to her."
While other professors were more supportive, Carey and Carr were not allowed to show Ladyporn at the end-of-the-year screenings last May and were advised not to use the University name in conjunction with the film.
"We were told we couldn't thank UT in the credits, we couldn't show that we were UT students," Carr said. "We could understand their concerns. It was shot in a UT studio ... technically, we're paying for the space that we use, the equipment, but in a way, the state is supporting this program supporting porn."
Carey believes that when people see the film, they won't be offended, that in fact, the film is something to be proud of.
Carr, however, slightly disagrees, noting that there are plenty of very conservative people in the Capital City.
"A guy we know told one of his classmates about the film and she said, 'I'm not going to see that,' Carr said. "It's not like there is violence towards women, or it's totally perverse, or there are weird fetishes, it's normal sex well, relatively normal. But still, I think it will offend some people."
Besides battling the porn-repulsed portion of society over the nature of their taboo material, Carey and Carr also ran into the problem of attaching a definite definition to ladyporn. Well, Mr. Freud, what do w
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