Porn You Won't Find on Pornhub

As I approached Secret Project Robot, the small Brooklyn venue where an event billing itself as New York City's first ever porn festival took place this weekend, I was greeted by three police cars and a nearly a dozen female protesters yelling "Porn is bad for women!" and holding "Stop Patriarchy" signs. Two NYPD officers stood at the helm of the crowd, calmly observing the skirmish.

"Pat-ree-archy…Pat-ri-air-kee?" one of the police officers said to the other, struggling to read the signs.

"Patriarchy," the other officer corrected him. "It's like…when men run things."

So began my experience at the NYC Porn Film Festival, a three-day event that had hundreds of people packing into the modest DIY art venue in Bushwick, many likely looking for a Miley Cyrus film that wa​sn't there, or a James Franco appearance that ultimately never happened at the screening of his film Interior. Leather Bar.

But celebrity was not the intention of the festival, which aimed only to create a spectacle and spark discussion around a kind of media almost everyone consumes, according to its founder Simon Leahy.

"The whole thing is just an experiment," he said. "The only reason I made this festival was to ask questions and provoke thoughts. That's it."

That mentality led to a whiplash-inducing lineup, including everything from groundbreaking lesbian porn from the 70s to porn filmed by drones, with bizarre and horrific films sprinkled liberally throughout. Most videos were between one and 15 minutes in length, and contrary to the impression given by the protestors outside, 70 percent of submissions were directed by women.

The festival had an anything-goes vibe (within the constraints of the law, more or less). On Saturday, the first round of films in the "experimental" category featured one porno with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in an all-out pizza orgy, and another porno whose plot consisted mostly of a man in a pig masks performing various sex acts on a woman in a fur coat who whipped him with bacon and poured cans of beans on him.

The day then took a quick turn towards the academic with a talk featuring Barbara Hammer, an icon of experimental and queer film. Hammer showed her film Dyketactics! (1974), the first lesbian-made, lesbian porno. She discussed the broader implications of her work and of pornography at large.

"Showing lesbian sex in a heterosexual world was inherently a political act at the time," she said of her films. Hammer added that she did not see the NYC Porn festival as a porn festival, but a "post-porn film festival," because many of the submissions didn't have a utilitarian, sexual function but served as a means to open the conversation about sex and sexuality.

But that's not to say the pornographic films didn't serve their traditional functions. One staff member told me a handful of attendees asked him if they were allowed to masturbate in the theater where the films were playing, to which one organizer said, "Fuck yeah." It's unclear if this actually happened, though, and seems unlikely given the large number of police officers monitoring the festival throughout.

The set-up did encourage audience interaction, however. The casual bench seating allowing viewers to sip on cheap beer and discuss the films with friends nearby. Before every screening, an introduction clip encouraged viewers to "discuss, laugh, gasp, giggle and scream quietly and respectfully." One man sitting next to me, apparently attending the festival alone, inexplicably hummed show tunes throughout the films.

"The way the films are shown here is really intense," Leahy said. "Watching porn collectively in a room totally changes the experience."

​

The intro video shown before every set of films. (Image: Kari Paul)

It was rumored that at least one attendee left a screening to throw up, apparently feeling overstimulated by the experience. Surprisingly, this did not occur during the "extreme" films section, which featured one movie where a woman sliced off her breast with a butcher knife and made orange juice with the blood. Another film from this section looked like a typical lesbian porno, until a giant, reptilian claw burst out of one woman's vagina and sucked the other one in. The audience erupted into laughter, clapping and cheering on the gore together.

The film shown directly after the horror porn was Graphic Sexual Horror, a documentary about actual horror porn. The extremely educational and well-rounded documentary followed infamous BDSM site Insex.com, which pushed the boundaries of sexuality and violence and exploded in popularity in the early days of the internet.

The variety within the lineup at the festival was truly impressive, and for Leahy, central to his mission. He said showing a more mainstream movie like Tila Tequila: Backdoored & Squirting, an "extreme" porno made by former reality star Tila Tequila that opened the festival, is just as important as screening queer and feminist porn or futuristic adult films comprised entirely of gifs.

"I've been to a lot of feminist festivals and queer festivals and sometimes it feels too exclusive only showing one genre of film, and it's not necessarily what everyone watches to get off," he said. "We want to show regular jack-off porn too. And we want do other weird stuff, and to create spectacles and get people talking."

With the success of this year's festival, Leahy is already looking towards the future, and hoping to create more of a spectacle in the next event. He said next year, he wants to work with an adult industry lawyer to get as close to the edge of what is legal as possible.

Still wishing there was ppl in bikini's, faked tanned & getting finger banged by the public. #more2cum

— NYCPFF (@NYCPORNFILMFEST) March 1, 2015