Porn Star and Feminist: On Jane Kamensky’s “Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution”

“DID PORN KILL feminism?” asked Amia Srinivasan in her widely read book The Right to Sex (2021). In the internet age, it sure can look that way. As Srinivasan pointed out, top commercial porn sites host billions of visitors every month. Today’s college students grew up with those sites just a click away. Many had their first sexual experiences in front of a computer screen. When she talked with her own college students, she saw the consequences:

Could it be that pornography doesn’t merely depict the subordination of women, but actually makes it real, I asked? Yes, they said. Does porn silence women, making it harder for them to protest against unwanted sex, and harder for men to hear those protests? Yes, they said. Does porn bear responsibility for the objectification of women, for the marginalisation of women, for sexual violence against women? Yes, they said, yes to all of it.

If that’s true, then what should we make of the life of Candida Royalle? As Jane Kamensky’s beautifully crafted new biography, Candida Royalle and the Sexual Revolution: A History from Below, reveals, Royalle, who died in 2015, was a porn star and a feminist. And so were many of her friends. As Srinivasan notes, it would be easy to blame porn and the sex wars of the 1980s for turning a women’s liberation movement that “exploded with such joyous fury” in the 1960s into “a fractured and worn thing” today. But Kamensky’s deft portrait of Royalle undercuts that explanation, and even the tale of feminism’s decline. As she follows Royalle from the Eisenhower era through feminist consciousness-raising groups to San Francisco’s drag scene and L.A.’s porn industry, and finally to the talk show circuit and the halls of academe, Kamensky shows that the sexual revolution was always only partly about sex. It was also about technological transformation; about personal branding, the search for authenticity; and about the blurring of private life and screen life. We may think of these things as artifacts of our digital age, but Candida Royalle knew them well. She lived her politics as many of us live ours today, in her body and on the screen simultaneously.

Candida Royalle wasn’t her real name, of course. It was the porn name of Candice Vadala, a child whose early years read like something straight out of Dickens. Her mother, Peggy, reportedly threw herself down the stairs hoping to end her pregnancy. When Candice was born anyway, at home, Peggy decamped: she left her jazz drummer husband Louis to raise the new baby along with her slightly older sister, Cindi, while taking their brother to raise herself. Candice never saw her mother again. Her father bounced from job to job, put the girls in a care home for a while (where Candice was lashed with a leather whip), and eventually remarried. His new wife, Helen, was a drunk and no fan of the girls. As they became teenagers, Louis began to hover outside Cindi’s bedroom, spying. When he tucked Cindi in at night, he’d ask, “Do you want a Daddy kiss or a lover kiss?” In 1964, when Candice was 13 and her sister 15, Louis wrote in Cindi’s diary: “Let’s fuck & neck.” When Cindi showed this to her stepmother, she gave Cindi five dollars and herself decamped, driving to her mother’s house in Florida. She would come back and she would leave again, showing no more affection for her stepdaughters than she had the first time.

Thus far, Candice Vadala’s life reads like a classic prescription for a career in porn. Any armchair psychoanalyst could make the diagnosis: Vadala loved and wanted to be loved by her father and was jealous of her sister’s sexual hold over him. What better way than sex work to show the world how lovable she really was, how sexually magnetic? Kamensky lets this question linger in the air, but she never lets it take over her narrative. As its title suggests, the book is both an account of Vadala’s life and a bottom-up history of the sexual revolution. With the lightest of interpretive touches, Kamensky suggests that the family’s emotional pattern matched a set of culturally common roles in the United States at the time: “Louis powerless before his urges. Helen mute and raging. Cynthia blossoming yet fragile.” In other words, Kamensky implies, Vadala was set up for porn not simply by her family but by the America of the early 1960s.

It is hard to overstate how moving this portion of the book is, and how surprising. Tales of the sexual revolution told by American historians tend to feature elite intellectuals and activists, street marches and late-night meetings, with an occasional wink in the direction of Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973). Vadala lives so far down the class ladder as to be invisible to that kind of storyteller. She only became visible to Kamensky when the historian spotted her obituary. Kamensky had just taken over the leadership of the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe, the premier repository for the papers of American feminists, and she wondered if Vadala had left an archive.

Boy, had she ever. Though she never earned a college degree and had trouble spelling all her life, Vadala kept a detailed diary from the age of 11. Its pages brim with frank inquisitiveness, and a willingness to try to see herself and her world as they were. Her early diaries reveal a young woman trapped in circumstances that would have been familiar to an earlier generation of writers too—women like Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton. Vadala’s voice on the page may be that of a young girl, but her ability to render in prose the texture of her claustrophobic home life recalls parts of Plath’s novel The Bell Jar (1963), while her ability to remain playfully curious despite the circumstances evokes Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl (1947).

By 1970, when she was living in New York City, Vadala had found her way into psychotherapy. As she told her diary, she was learning that the “feeling of being a tramp has been with me for a very long time and has affected many things I do.” Just a few days later, she ended up at the Women’s Liberation Collective of the Bronx Coalition, a women’s consciousness-raising group. Kamensky uses this development to lay out the distinctions between the consciousness-oriented feminism of such groups and the more institutional approach of the then-recently founded National Organization for Women. And as she does, she faces what must have been a temptation to overreach, to claim Vadala as a long-overlooked member of the movement’s sisterhood.

The diary saves her, revealing that Vadala embraced feminism in ways that had less to do with collective struggle than with her personal demons. In her diary, she wrote, “I believe my father’s actions had very great social significance […] Sure he was perverted & disturbed & took his feelings & actions to a sick degree. But in essence he was saying I have a penis & a power over you.” Kamensky calls her book a “history from below,” and this is where the power of her approach to unsettle the standard histories of feminism begins to show itself. There are no marches here, no collectively drafted manifestos; there is only Candice Vadala, trying to make sense of her life. Such individual sense-making drove many second-wave activists too, of course. But Vadala’s engagement with feminism had little to do with building sisterhood or with teasing out the implications for women of Marx and Lacan. The personal was political for her primarily in an intimate way.

Sex with men often felt empowering, even when it wasn’t much fun. Her diary presents a running chronicle of boyfriends, one-night stands, long-haired boy-men bent on “relating” on the sofa or the bed. It records her move to San Francisco at 21, where she discovered LSD and began running with members of San Francisco’s premier hippie drag theater crews, the Cockettes and the Angels of Light. But it leaves her turn to porn unexplained. Kamensky tells it straight: sometime in her early twenties, Vadala started going on dates for pay, doing a little nude modeling, and then, by 1975, she was making “loops”—short, silent, plotless films of sex acts, usually screened in the back rooms of triple-X arcades. Soon after that, she starred in her first full-length porn movie, The Analyst (1975), in which she played a patient whose psychoanalyst “reforms” her by introducing her to anal sex.

Vadala started appearing in porn movies just as the industry was taking off. Mainstream movie theaters had begun to show X-rated fare—Deep Throat (1972), Last Tango in Paris (1973), Emmanuelle (1974)—and the first issues of Hustler had hit the newsstands next to Playboy. Technology was changing too. The VCR appeared in stores the same year that Vadala began making her loops. Within a few years, it would turn millions of American living rooms into private porn theaters, and more than a few Americans into amateur porn stars too.

The sudden efflorescence of pornography set off an earthquake in American feminism. While Vadala was starring in films like Hot & Saucy Pizza Girls (1978), more conventional feminists were marching to “take back the night” and, very soon, to stamp out pornography. In 1979, the group Women Against Pornography sent 5,000 women marching through Times Square carrying placards reading “Pornography Is Anti-Female Propaganda” and “Porn Is Violence Against Women.” The group’s founders included some of the most famous feminists of the day, such as Susan Brownmiller, Gloria Steinem, Adrienne Rich, and Robin Morgan. Their views on pornography foreshadowed those of Amia Srinivasan’s students. To film sex for money was to assault the women involved, they argued. To show porn was to repeat the assault, this time on the audience. The more common porn became, the more often sex could be seen on the screen, the more normal, legitimate, and common assaults on women would become.

In 1982, anti-porn forces met their match on the staid campus of Barnard College. There, as part of an annual conference on feminism and scholarship, anthropologist Carole Vance gathered a group of pro-sex feminists, including Gayle Rubin, one of the founders of the lesbian feminist BDSM collective Samois. Where the anti-porn activists emphasized the dangers of sex, the organizers of the Barnard Conference emphasized its pleasures. As Kamensky points out, they gathered to answer a question posed by Vance: “How do women get sexual pleasure in patriarchy?” On the day of the conference, 800 people attended the presentations. Outside the conference, a group called the Coalition for a Feminist Sexuality and Against Sadomasochism marched and handed out fliers denouncing those within.

As one of Kamensky’s sources notes, the conference suddenly made visible a new kind of feminism based less on fear of oppression and a search for rights than on the celebration of desire. For scholars and activists like Rubin, desire could be a foundation of solidarity. The depiction of sexuality, even its performance in the theatrical language of sadomasochism, could not only enhance the audience’s pleasure but also reveal that they shared the same desires and so give them an experience of community. Though Kamensky never says it out loud, the parallels are clear: Vadala, like Rubin, put sexual pleasure at the center of her life, took it public, and found her people.

As she unspools Vadala’s life, Kamensky shows how Candice took neither one side nor the other in the sex wars, but something closer to both. In the mid-1980s, as her career as a porn performer began to lag, she co-founded a company called Femme Productions to produce porn for women. At one level, she and her partner simply spotted a market opportunity: they knew that lots of women watched porn but that virtually all porn was made for men. Kamensky points out that the company wasn’t just trying to make money; it was also trying to answer the question of whether there could be a “feminist porn”—that is, a way to use media to give women pleasure within the patriarchy.

Vadala wasn’t “peddling politics,” Kamensky writes, but in an era when cable TV and the VCR had sent the porn industry into testosterone-fueled overdrive, Vadala’s work at Femme couldn’t help but be seen as political. She soon found herself invited to Europe to lecture on “what women want” alongside novelist Kathy Acker and Samois co-founder Pat Califia. In 1985, as the Reagan administration and the New Right launched an all-out assault on the porn industry, Vadala appeared on Phil Donahue’s hit daytime program, going head-to-head with the anti-porn movement’s most fearsome intellect, law professor Catharine MacKinnon. According to MacKinnon, making porn for women had nothing to do with feminism. “The photographers have been trying to make a woman’s market since day one,” she said. Vadala, who knew the market in ways the professor never could, replied, “No, they have not.”

Their exchange, however brief, was telling. Now, thanks to the ubiquity of TV and VCRs, porn stars no longer had to hang their heads in shame. The rise of new ways to distribute porn, together with a broad loosening of American sexual mores, had gone a long way to dissolving the stigma of sex work. In 1985, desktop computers were arriving too, and entrepreneurs were linking them to one another as fast as they could. In the digital era, the sheer number and variety of ways to make and show pornography would do to the industry what it had done to so many others: disaggregate, splinter, polarize.

Vadala fought fiercely to keep the place she had earned. She marketed Femme films to sexologists. She spoke on college campuses. She got a literary agent, found a co-author, and wrote a book called How to Tell a Naked Man What to Do: Sex Advice from a Woman Who Knows (2004). And, as ever, she turned to her diary. “I am an innovator. I have changed the world!” she wrote in 1999, when she was almost 50 years old. The next year, she faxed her new boyfriend a message: “I HATE PORNO!!!!!!! […] And I fear the young men being brought up on this latest crop of feelingless mechanical crap are learning some terrible things about sex and women.”

Vadala’s ambivalence speaks volumes about the relationship between porn and feminism, then and now. In 1982, the sex-positive, pro-porn feminists gathered at Barnard College made the case that sexual desire could be liberated, if not necessarily from patriarchy, then at least within it. To make porn could be to bring sex out of the shadows, to help everyone imagine that, somewhere, there was another person who shared their desires. To see sex on the screen or the page meant to see a bigger, more cosmopolitan society too, and to imagine being free within it.

Vadala’s life reminds us that the search for that freedom took place alongside an explosion of new media technologies and markets. For anti-porn feminists like MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, to depict sex was to enact the domination of women by men. Anti-porn feminists tended to assume that watching a film depicting sex was the same as watching sex itself. In their view, mediation—like many forms of sex—was always already a weapon of patriarchy. But, as Vadala’s life reveals, mediation was only part of the problem. Money mattered too—a lot. Porn stars might have seen themselves as self-actualized entrepreneurs, as Vadala sometimes did. But they were also worked hard and paid badly. As new media technologies enlarged and diversified the market for porn, they created new incentives for producers to pressure actors into ever more extreme, attention-getting sexual behaviors.

By the time Vadala died from cancer, surrounded by her friends, Americans had indeed come to live in a world in which the full array of human sexual desires could be seen on a screen. Though MacKinnon and Dworkin would say otherwise, it seems clear that the ubiquitous depiction of sex in all its variety has aided and abetted the efforts of feminists, queer activists, and many others to love whom they want to, openly and without fear, free of the shame that pervaded the Eisenhower era. But as Srinivasan’s students remind us, that freedom has not come without a cost.

Candice Vadala paid part of that price on our behalf.