SAN FRANCISCO – When Joe Ruffalo first started watching porn in the early 1970s, the act required far more commitment than it does today. One couldn’t simply fire up a web browser and surf free videos to his heart’s content. Depending on where a guy lived, his town might not have a single business that sold even softcore porn magazines, let alone hardcore movies.
“I remember skulking down dark alleys and practically sprinting in the front door of Al’s Movie Hut, a little hole-in-the-wall business with a lot of actual little holes in the walls in strategic places, if you catch my drift,” Ruffalo said. “On the one hand, it was a sketchy little joint, but on the other hand, I sort of miss the piercing scent of the industrial air-freshener they sprayed all over to cover up the smell of stale, dry semen.”
While most porn back then didn’t really do it for Ruffalo, he figured it was “better than nothing, which is what I was getting in terms of actual sex at the time.”
“It was a hard time to be a straight guy in the Bay Area,” Ruffalo said. “Even the women who weren’t lesbians didn’t much like men — or their bras, judging by how many of those things they set on fire back then.”
Then, one day something happened. Ruffalo described the event as “like a bolt of erotic lightning sent from Heaven.” That was the day Ruffalo saw his first Candida Royalle movie, Femme.
The film was a revelation for Ruffalo, compelling evidence that not every adult film needed to include a man with a mustache hunched over a woman who looked miserable, ejaculating in her general direction while making sounds that resembled those generated by Ruffalo’s poorly maintained 1965 Pontiac Tempest on a cold morning.
“I’ve never thought of myself as a ‘feminist,’ especially when it comes to porn, but something about Candida’s work really spoke to me,” Ruffalo said. “And for once, what porn was saying to me wasn’t ‘You’re a sick man, Joe; get professional help immediately.’”
These days, Ruffalo is having a decidedly different reaction to one of Royalle’s successors in the field of woman-friendly porn, Erika Lust.
“Jesus tap-dancing Christ I’m fucking sick to death of reading about this self-important Swede and her heroic campaign to reshape the modern porn industry,” Ruffalo said. “For fuck’s sake, to hear the media tell it, you’d think a woman had never so much as taken a picture of a naked person until this chick showed up on the scene.”
While Ruffalo said he has nothing against Lust, he can’t help feeling like her relentless promotion in the media as a standard bearer for a new feminist porn movement is leading people to underestimate the historical significance of Royalle, whom he regards as the true innovator of female-friendly erotica.
For that matter, Ruffalo noted, Lust isn’t even the second or third person who comes to mind when he thinks about ground-breakers in modern erotica made with women in mind.
“Just look at the recent profile of her by PaperMag,” Ruffalo said. “In it, Lust talks about how when she first started looking into shooting porn for women, everybody told her not to bother, that there was no such thing as a market for porn for women. Well, if that story sounds familiar, it’s because it’s exactly the same one Angie Rowntree from Sssh.com tells, almost word for word — except Rowntree first told it in fucking 1994, people.”
Ruffalo also emphasized he thinks Lust makes “pretty decent porn,” but he’s growing weary of the “ceaseless media ass-kissing” of someone whose perceived originality and innovation in erotica is far greater than her actual contributions to the genre.
“To me, this is a little like making a big freaking deal out of the innovative guitar style of John Butcher, then responding to someone saying the name Jimi Hendrix by shrugging and asking who they’re talking about,” Ruffalo said. “Young people today have no sense of history, whether it’s the history of feminist porn, or the history of their country. Shit, these millennials probably think ‘Abe Lincoln’ is an American-made luxury sedan.”
