Dare - Elegant Angel (2012)
The controversy surrounding Elegant Angel’s release Dare (2012) seems to center around Dani Daniels’ crossing towards boy/girl pornography. The film has raised debates which cover areas such as the “degrading aspect” of boy/girl porn and the veracity embedded in filmed porn, to the significance of performers’ sexual orientation. Undoubtedly, Dare is a groundbreaking project, but for reasons yet not mentioned in fan forums or Twitter, where Daniels herself is receiving a lot of negative criticism – some even address to her own person and private life, eliminating the boundaries of fiction and reality.
Dani Daniels is not the first performer in history to broaden her field of action. Many performers have initiated in girl/girl porn and, later, made their way into boy/girl features for whatever reasons. The pressure from the industry to prevent performers from positioning themselves into segmented niches has financial motives; nonetheless, limits are constantly being tested, and the step further presents itself as the innovative glitch studios are after to keep sales from dropping – and to test boundaries in a postmodern world which delineates itself without limits. It is not by chance, therefore, that Elegant Angel latest marketing campaign announces a sequence of firsts: Dani Daniels’ first boy/girl scene, Lily Carter’s first DP and DAP, Asa Akira’s first gangbang. However, although Dare innovates by portraying Daniels in boy/girl scenes, its biggest value lies on the discourse it presents in terms of female agency inside the pornographic industry.
In the opening interview, Daniels states “I found my way into porn myself” (my emphasis). Daniels’ entire discourse emphasizes the importance she places on her own agency inside the industry,
I knew what I was getting into, I knew what I was going to do. I had this formula: ‘I’m only going to do girl/girl, I’m only going to do this, I’m going to do this’, and now I am like ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do anymore.’
Me, as a person, I’ve always been into one man and many women, that’s just me, that’s the real Dani.
When talking about what is different between doing boy/girl and girl/girl scenes,
‘I’m used to waking up and, like, oh, I’m going to fuck her today, and I’m gonna’, like, it was me, like, ‘I’m going to fuck’, and today’s like ‘I’m getting fucked’.
Daniels is aware of the different social roles perpetrated by sexual gendering. She is conscious that, in traditional porn, females are only allowed true agency when paired with another female, and are expected to take on a more submissive role when working with a male performer. However, even in that position, Daniels refuses to let go of her agency; instead, she is the one who walks into scenes, and ALL the utterances that form the corpus of the sexual oral interaction position Daniels as the primary and central character in the act: she verbally demands rather than offers pleasure and sexual gratification, the only exception made in her scene with Sinn Sage, whom she allows to partake subjectivity – ironically, after an intro that parodies boy/girl interaction, with Daniels dressed up in a suit and smoking a (phallic) cigar while Sinn Sage dances for her. “Rub your pussy on me”, Daniels says, this way equaling Sage to herself.
Daniels herself states the premises in which this film is based:
What does it mean to be a pornstar in 2012?
(…) There is no pornstars anymore. It’s about … something else. With pornstars I just think, I think of like… ‘Yeah, that pornstar sucked my dick last night’, it’s so like not about the girl, the girl becomes a sexual item. Where I feel like porn nowadays is about the girl. It’s about watching a girl get off, like, fuck a guy getting off, yeah, he comes at the end… on her face… okay… It’s about watching the girl, it’s about watching the girl come while it’s happening. Which, I am not a porn watcher, but I can guess, 80s, 90s porn is not like that. I can guess that girls didn’t even cum, girls just sat there like oh, oh, oh, you know, that’s a scene, then he cums on her face and it’s like, yeah… Now it’s like fucking finger my ass, make me squirt, make me scream, make me convulse, and then you can come, when I am done with you, you can come. You’re mine now, you are my object, I am not your sexual object, you are my sexual object.
As a result – or as indicative – of Dare’s new approach to female agency and subjectivity, it is important to point out that none of the scenes end the traditional way, that it, with the male ejaculation. Instead, after facials, the focus returns to Daniels, and in all sexual interactions throughout the feature she is the one who orgasms last.
Dani Daniels subjectifies women in porn, centering it on female pleasure and objectifying the male. Here lies the core of discomfort for so many viewers: the switching of the conventional paradigm – a phenomenon we have been watching designing itself inside contemporary pornographic productions – had never before been so explicitly posed in front of a camera. And it is by making official a discourse which has been put into silent practice and that, when put into words, questions traditions and stirs the boat on another direction that Dare parts waters. Waters many will not dare to sail.
- Published October 22, 2012