For the director of The Spinoff’s new series Porn Revolution, it was important to approach the topic with a critical lens – but also one that’s shame-free and sex-positive.

All this week on The Spinoff we’re talking about porn. Click here for more Porn Week stories. 

Until this year, I had the kind of relationship with pornography that I suspect a sizeable portion of women my age have. The word “pornography” only meant one thing and it existed out there on the internet: a whole sea of free stuff with dubious titles constructed by and for the male gaze. An incognito tab might be opened occasionally, but I was relatively apathetic. It was simply something that existed that wasn’t made for me.

Then in May, Hex Work Productions commissioner Sophie Dowson asked if I wanted to direct a documentary series about it. Six months later, I really, really care about porn.

Pornography is everywhere yet most of us publicly ignore it. It sits at the intersection of a raft of questions about gender, ethics, and social values; it’s always been at the vanguard of advances in technology and monetisation. And of course it connects with deeply personal questions about sexual desire, sexual expression and masturbation (a word we often ignore in connection to porn).

In Aotearoa, there’s just so much we haven’t talked about.

When a subject lacks robust discussion, our reference points become narrow. The same media narratives are repeated, and even if we’re not really listening they still drum a beat in our subconscious. Don’t become a porn addict. Porn affects brain chemicals. Porn fuels crime. Once you start looking under the bonnet, each one of these black-and-white headlines represent extremely contested areas of research. But with repetition and not much interrogation, these ideas become the only ways we have to talk about porn.

I’m not a porn expert, but I make stories, and I’m fascinated by how the narratives we tell ourselves affect our lives for better or worse. Chris Parker and Eli Matthewson aren’t experts either, but they make comedy, and good comedians have an especially well-honed radar for things we don’t talk about but probably should. The idiosyncrasies of our unspoken human responses are a comedian’s home territory, and a big one when it comes to porn is shame and secrecy. When the overarching public narrative is consistently about harm, you can understand why.

So we wanted to introduce some different narratives. Our lens is critical, yet scare-free and sex-positive. We wanted to hear from consumers, we wanted to find out what’s behind and beyond free mainstream online porn, what independent or ethical porn looks like, and most importantly, we wanted to speak with those whom we rarely hear from in Aotearoa: the people making porn here now.

But on top of that, Chris and Eli love a task, so they set themselves an outlandish one: to take their learning and launch a campaign to get New Zealand to talk more about porn in ways that don’t reinscribe the repeated responses of shame and punishment. They have just one problem. At the beginning of their journey, the friends don’t have a clue what their sharp, pithy call-to-action – the mainstay of any campaign – should be. So throughout the series, the more they learn, the more they try to hone their slogan. With a subject as crunchy and nuanced as this, it sometimes feels like an impossible task.

For the past five years, Chris and Eli have hosted a podcast called The Male Gayz. What I love about the nature of audio is how intimate it can be. On The Male Gayz, no subject is off-limits. The two friends always ask questions of each other, stay curious, fumble and laugh their way through conversations.

For this series, I wanted to find a simple visual mode that would platform this intimacy and offer a way in which some level of complexity (and comedy) could be navigated in a short 15-minute timeframe. In our hot-take world where conviction and righteousness are weapons, an everyday space where Chris and Eli were allowed to “not know” and just be our friends working it out felt important. There’s something unique about car conversations – the being-together-but-looking-ahead coupled with the constant movement means your own thoughts can travel. So Chris’ car became the key environment of the show.

It felt like the right choice when we interviewed Kate Whitaker, who works in education and outreach at Te Mana Whakaatu – the Classifications Office. A piece of advice she often gives to parents starting conversations with their kids about sex, healthy relationships, or porn is to try chatting in the car. Not least because there’s always a guaranteed end to the conversation.

Outside of Chris and Eli’s immense ability to make us laugh, you might be wondering why a documentary about a genre of content that’s starkly underpinned by gender power dynamics is being fronted by two men. Well, men watch porn. Women watch it way more than is commonly acknowledged, but porn’s consumers are overwhelmingly men. Heterosexual men seem to have the choice of only two narratives: casual locker-room joking, or the fear of being a porn “addict”. There’s very little in between. So some pretty deep concerns remain unspoken, which is never a good place for them to be. For me, some of the most compelling conversations in the series are when Chris and Eli open up the discussion with men.

Additionally, Chris and Eli are two queer men and we’re a queer and bisexual creative team. Because free online mainstream porn is overwhelmingly created by heterosexual men, conversations around porn often get unhelpfully locked into a familiar cisgender, heterosexual discursive framework. While Chris and Eli have lots to learn throughout the series, approaching the subject through their lens allows us to acknowledge that porn can be many things to many people, and our relationships to it can be deeply complex and sometimes contradictory. Eli’s layered disclosure in the car in the first minute of the series underscores this.

One of the first things Chris told me at the start of making this series was that he’d always felt a kind of connection to porn, it being one of the first ways he was able to discover and explore his sexual identity. In my cerebral, conscious brain, this felt like a completely new idea. Watching free online mainstream porn as a woman is so often an exercise in disconnection; even lesbian porn is made for men. Yet when I had the chance to be honest with myself, I realised that subconsciously it wasn’t a new idea at all. Of course I’d tried to explore my own sexual identity through porn, but it was simply something I’d ignored because the mode of delivery was considered “wrong”.

There’s something special about the friends who help you understand a different story about yourself because they’re so unapologetically themselves; like all of us, full of both assertion and confusion, learning, being critical, and working it out, but still standing in the experience that’s true to them. That’s the spirit of this series.

We absolutely should be talking more about porn. We should also chat about how we’re talking about it. I reckon it takes some bold, curious minds to step in and acknowledge what they don’t know in order to get the conversation started, allow us to go on the journey with them, and maybe introduce some new narratives.

Luckily for all of us watching, Chris and Eli are our friends. And they’re the funniest friends at the party, so we know whatever they discover, they’ll make us laugh.