One of the evening activities after Sex 2.0 (Twitter tag #sex20con) this evening was a screening of award-winning porn, including Matinee, directed by Jennifer Lyon Bell, from the Cinekink 2009 event. Here’s a synopsis of Matinee from Cinekink

Actors Mariah and Daniel play lovers every night, but their onstage romance lacks spark. One slow afternoon, they discover that today’s matinée performance will make or break both of their careers. Daniel wants to make big changes, and Mariah starts to wonder: are Daniel’s suggestions reasonable? Or has he lost track of the boundary between actor and character? Rushed to the stage, in front of a live audience, they must figure it out together.

They said it here.

I came in late and, because the room was very crowded, I didn’t stay long. And so I don’t know much about the premise or plot. But the one sex scene I saw was in my opinion a real eye-opener.

The female lead leads! Every step of the way she’s the active party. The point of view focuses on both of them but she’s the one doing the foreplay, stroking him hard, eating him, unwrapping the condom, pulling him toward her, guiding him into her. Even when he’s on top she’s actively moving up against him as much as he’s moving into her.

They separate before either of them come. She climbs on top of him. He holds himself this time, but more to hold himself steady as engulfs him. Once they’re joined he leans back and she moves. As she gets more excited she reaches down and rolls her own clitoris.

Again they stop before either of them come. She rolls back. Their hands join over her vulva. He strokes her to a well-acted but persuasive rather than porn/theatrical orgasm. Rather than jump to the next scene there’s a really nice enactment of the pause for “aftershock” care.

There were a lot of highly non-vanilla people present and I didn’t think the film was well received (they may have just been really rowdy, or else perhaps the into scenes, which I didn’t see, were unbearably hokey.) But I thought from a gender-role perspective its hetero/vanilla veneer made it all the more transgressive. She put the condom on him even before she began to eat him. The pace and tempo was in regular-intercourse tempo rather than the conventional hyper-porn bippity-bippity-bip pace that, I think, is pitched more for the tempo of male masturbation. There was no money shot. No calling anyone a bitch or grimacing out “give me your fat rutabaga you big stud.” At least while I was there she came and he didn’t. In fact except that there was nudity, PIV penetration, and couple of porn-style moans and groans it missed most of the tropes I remember driving me to give up on video porn.

That last bit is kind of interesting: any bumpkin in porn can cough out a money shot, and many do. The standard routine is, roughly, that the director gets all the shots he or she needs, all the positions, acts, and angles, and then they stop everything re-arrange the shoot, and the actor stands or kneels and quickly wanks out an ejaculation. Usually on somebody else’s body or face. Whee! Just how I always want to finish when I have sex (but, to be fair, it probably helps the target-male customer identify since at that point he’s probably masturbating too.) What’s different about Matinee is that she has the “money shot” using only his hands — considerably more difficult even for porn actresses to produce in male actors (given how rarely they do it instead of him.)

An important point that I probably wouldn’t have picked up on if I hadn’t been watching with other, perhaps more porn-savvy viewers: I get the impression is more of a masturbation aid than representative sex. And so, I think, maybe the stylized, 7-minute naked-step-aerobics of “real” porn is more effective for people who use it to get off than the stuff regular people do. (Sort of like you might enjoy seeing a whole top-chef episode worth of effort to prepare your meal even though you probably wouldn’t want to cook under that kind of pressure yourself every evening.

But by and large? Although personally I like a little more turn-taking when I have sex it was all in all the kind of slow comfortable, cuddly, orgasmic screw I’d thoroughly enjoy spending a matinee-long afternoon doing with a partner.

Anyway, cool scene in what looked like a cool movie. (The Cinekink jury evidently agreed. They gave Matinee the award for best narrative short.